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I grew up in Australia, in a loving, secular home, and arrived at Sydney University as a critic of “religion.” I didn’t need faith to ground my identity or my values. I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to study history at Cambridge and become a historian. My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths. As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my Ph.D. in History at King’s College, Cambridge. King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.

After Cambridge, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford. There, I attended three guest lectures by world-class philosopher and atheist public intellectual, Peter Singer. Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion; a premise which needs to be agreed upon before any conversation can take place.

I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo; I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism.

I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo; I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism. But I knew from my own research in the history of European empires and their encounters with indigenous cultures, that societies have always had different conceptions of human worth, or lack thereof. The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent. I began to realise that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear.

One afternoon, I noticed that my usual desk in the college library was in front of the Theology section. With an awkward but humble reluctance, I opened a book of sermons by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. As I read, I was struck at how intellectually compelling, complex, and profound the gospel was. I was attracted, but I wasn’t convinced.

A few months later, near the end of my time at Oxford, I was invited to a dinner for the International Society for the Study of Science and Religion. I sat next to Professor Andrew Briggs, a Professor of Nanomaterials, who happened to be a Christian. During dinner, Briggs asked me whether I believed in God. I fumbled. Perhaps I was an agnostic? He responded, “Do you really want to sit on the fence forever?” That question made me realise that if issues about human value and ethics mattered to me, the response that perhaps there was a God, or perhaps there wasn’t, was unsatisfactory.

With the freedom of being an outsider to American culture, I was able to see an active Christianity in people who lived their lives guided by the gospel: feeding the homeless every week, running community centres, and housing and advocating for migrant farm laborers.

In the Summer of 2008, I began a new job as Assistant Professor at Florida State University, where I continued my research examining the relationship between the history of science, Christianity, and political thought. With the freedom of being an outsider to American culture, I was able to see an active Christianity in people who lived their lives guided by the gospel: feeding the homeless every week, running community centres, and housing and advocating for migrant farm laborers.

One Sunday, shortly before my 28th birthday, I walked into a church for the first time as someone earnestly seeking God. Before long I found myself overwhelmed. At last I was fully known and seen and, I realised, unconditionally loved – perhaps I had a sense of relief from no longer running from God. A friend gave me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and one night, after a couple months of attending church, I knelt in my closet in my apartment and asked Jesus to save me, and to become the Lord of my life.

From there, I started a rigorous diet of theology, reading the Bible and exploring theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and F.D. Maurice. Christianity, it turned out, looked nothing like the caricature I once held. I found the story of Jacob wrestling with God especially compelling: God wants anything but the unthinking faith I had once assumed characterized Christianity. God wants us to wrestle with Him; to struggle through doubt and faith, sorrow and hope. Moreover, God wants broken people, not self-righteous ones. And salvation is not about us earning our way to some place in the clouds through good works. On the contrary; there is nothing we can do to reconcile ourselves to God. As a historian, this made profound sense to me. I was too aware of the cycles of poverty, violence and injustice in human history to think that some utopian design of our own, scientific or otherwise, might save us.

In becoming fully human in Jesus, God behaved decidedly unlike a god.

Christianity was also, to my surprise, radical – far more radical than the leftist ideologies with which I had previously been enamored. The love of God was unlike anything which I expected, or of which I could make sense. In becoming fully human in Jesus, God behaved decidedly unlike a god. Why deign to walk through death’s dark valley, or hold the weeping limbs of lepers, if you are God? Why submit to humiliation and death on a cross, in order to save those who hate you? God suffered punishment in our place because of a radical love. This sacrificial love is utterly opposed to the individualism, consumerism, exploitation, and objectification, of our culture.

To live as a Christian is a call to be part of this new, radical, creation. I am not passively awaiting a place in the clouds.

Just as radical, I realized, was the new creation which Christ began to initiate. This turned on its head the sentimental caricature of ‘heaven’ I’d once held as an atheist. I learned that Jesus’ resurrection initiated the kingdom of God, which will “bring good news to the poor, release the captives, restore sight to the blind, free the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18) To live as a Christian is a call to be part of this new, radical, creation. I am not passively awaiting a place in the clouds. I am redeemed by Christ, so now I have work to do. With God’s grace, I’ve been elected to serve – in whatever way God sees fit – to build for His Kingdom. We have a sure hope that God is transforming this broken, unjust world, into Christ’s Kingdom, the New Creation.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is a Senior Lecturer (with tenure) in Modern European History at Western Sydney University in Australia. This article is copyrighted to The Veritas Forum and may not be reposted without prior written consent from The Veritas Forum. Please contact content@veritas.org with enquiries.

Where does Sarah’s vision of radical love underlying Christianity find expression in greater society? As a gay man, I’ve been driven very far away from the Christian religions in search of a personal spirituality that values love, community, acceptance and understanding. These are qualities that I see expressed in individual Christians but not what I see espoused by Evangelical pastors; the Catholic clergy; particular congregations, large and small; and certainly not what finds expression in so-called religious freedom legislation in the USA, which subordinates the freedom and happiness of non-Christians in favor of discriminatory interpretations of scripture. How does Christian love reconcile itself with politics and society that usurps that love to discriminate, humiliate, and ostracize? What do you say to the mother who knows God’s grace but ejects her own child from her home because he is gay? Is that a failure of the individual, or a failure of God?

I am a gay man who met Jesus Christ when a girl prayed for me in a pub. I said the exact same things before I met Jesus for myself. Often we put up defence mechanisms like our sexuality to the love of God like I did.

Awesome David…so glad to hear of a gay man coming to Christ..my cousins are gay (girl and guy) and both athiest to the hilt…I just pray they too will encounter the love of God as it sounds you did. Bless you.

Hi Shane, I can understand your viewpoint and I must admit that as Christians most of us have failed to understand the LGBT community. We neglected and alienated genuine seekers of Christ just because of their sexuality. It’s an institutional failure rather than God of Bible. Jesus love you and not your sin. If one is sincere to God then sexuality doesn’t come between God and the individual. Bro David has given up his sexulaity because it was coming inbetween him and his sexuality. There can be nothing bigger than God else we fail. We as humans fail in many ways but we keep looking at God whenever we fail and try to be genuine to God by not falling. It’s not an instant remedy but through prayer, fellowship and guidance we all can give up on anything that is pulling us behind from reach God.

I suggest you visit https://www.centerforfaith.com/ and you can meet someone who will be willing to talk to you and can help you find answers for your questions that no one has answered.

Unfortunately our sin *does* come between us and God, and it condemns us, irregardless of what slant we might like to put on it. Jesus specifically came and died as an answer to our sin, and to redeem us from it if we should so choose… not to enable us to persist in it. “Will you accept my son Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?” It is the “Lord” part that is the stickler for people – everyone wants the Saviour part but it’s a package deal – His life for ours, our life for His. But as David rightly says once we have experienced His love, what more is there? It is His incredible unstoppable love that brings us to repentance.

ps. Krishnam, I wasn’t aware that you could speak on behalf of “Bro David” and why he gave up his sin. I read his blog, can’t see that he said what you said he said. hmmm.

Hi Krishnam, didn’t say you misrepresented him, just that I couldn’t see that in what he had written and thought it best to leave his reasons to him. Great to hear we’re on the same page.

The amazing thing about Christ’s love is that is it truly radical, just like Sarah Irving-Stonebraker says. it is supernatural. He tells us to love and pray for our enemies, the ones that betray us, jail us, and bomb us. How can he do that? He can He expect that of anyone? Only because He puts His heart into us that we are able. He call us to Him and accepts us as we come to Him, broken and diseased, and loves us so much that he refuses to leave us in a pathetic bound state, but gives us new life and purpose in Him. What can resist that love? Why do any of us resists that love? Probably only because we haven’t heard about that love. Probably because we haven’t yet felt that love. But he promises us if we seek Him we shall find Him, and that perfect yet relentless love.

Keep up the good and faithful work of sharing that love and truth with others.

Obviously, free will can’t exist unless genuine choices exist. Thus God is responsible for the existence of sin only to the extent that He allows us to choose between sinfulness and righteousness as an essential prerequisite for our intellectual freedom. Question: which would be more ethical; a God who “designed the system” to offer only righteous choices, or a God who allows us freedom to sin?

No, not really. If he really is responsible for designing the system that produces sin, then he is fully responsible for the outcomes his system produces. There is no wiggle room.

As to free will, all though I’m still a bit undecided, there are good arguments that free will does not actually exist. Also, the Bible is replete with examples of god breaching free will.
No to mention, Christians make tons of intercessory prayers many of which conflict with the free will of others. However, that is for another discussion.

As to your Question, it would be more ethical to not design a system that produces undesirable results and then blame part of the system for the bad results.

I am not saying here that I believe there is actually a god and that he designed a bad system. But if there is a god, and he designed the system, I would say he has some explaining to do.

This topic is actually an offshoot from my original question that I posed, and which has as of yet gone unanswered by anyone responding on the thread.

Let me post it for you again and perhaps you can be the first. Everyone else has dodged..

If you could stop a child from being raped with absolutely no danger to yourself or anyone else, would you do it? Would it be immoral to not stop it, or moral?
If you think it is moral, I would love to hear how you justify such a position.
If you think it is immoral, then you and I agree, but your god has some explaining to do, because that is exactly what he does. Don’t go on about how he will be punished later. Would you stand by and say “go ahead and do it, but I will punish you later?” That is just as immoral. The rape was allowed. And per Christian doctrine, he can be forgiven anyway, so punishment is far from certain.

I agree God is responsible for sin’s existence, and I agree that makes Him ethically responsible for sin’s results. But ethically, I think the “outcome” (your word) of God’s actions is always desirable, because I believe in God as He is described in the Bible and the fundamental nature of such a God makes it impossible for Him to create a “system” with an undesirable outcome.

Because I believe that, I also believe there is no “system” (another of your words). “System” implies a self-contained universe with no purpose beyond its own existence, and no connection to anything larger that itself. If that were true, then it would make sense to define morality strictly in terms of humanity’s experiences here and now, as you apparently do. That’s how one gets to the non-Biblical perspective that pain is synonymous with evil, and pleasure is synonymous with good. And if we are indeed in a “system” going nowhere, then it’s understandable to assume that God, if he exists at all, is much like a cat toying with a mouse, having cruelly trapped us in an endless cycle of pleasure and pain. If one believes that even the best of good long lives usually ends in sickness and death followed by nothing whatsoever, then ethically and morally it would be better to not have created us at all.

But rather than trapping us in a closed system cycling pointlessly between “outcomes” of pleasure or pain which ends in death, the Bible says God has a reason God has set us on an eternal journey. Moment by moment, sometimes pleasant and sometimes painful, our thoughts and actions move us in one of two directions, either toward God, or away from Him. It is the direction of our thoughts and actions, not our momentary pain or pleasure, which determines whether anything is evil or good, sinful or righteous.

Now, to your question. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not use the rape of a baby as a hypothetical. The mere thought of such a thing cannot fail to draw emotions into this, and emotions can be so easily manipulated without regard to truth. So instead I’ll answer your question as if it had been asked about a little girl who is sitting in an orthodontist’s waiting room about to get new braces. Knowing what lies ahead for her, the months and possibly years of awful pain, would I intervene stop it?

And the answer is, of course not.

But this leads to other questions. Would I allow the braces because I don’t care if she suffers, or because I want her to suffer?

Again, of course not!

On the contrary, I would allow it because I know the process will result in something good enough to make the suffering worthwhile. But will the child, knowing I could stop it, assume it means I hate her or do not care about her?

That depends.

If she already thinks those things about me, the pain of braces might well seem like proof that she is right. But if she believes I love her and want the best for her and because I am an adult and not a child I know a great deal more than she does about how life really works, then she will be comforted by the thought that there is surely a good and loving reason for the pain, even though she can’t understand it now,. And she will be correct.

Whenever considering the problem of evil, it’s vital to understand two things: 1) evil and pain are not synonymous, and 2) our knowledge of the end results of human actions is extremely limited. Once we realize that, it makes the idea of a good, all powerful God completely possible.

I really liked what Sarah had to say (and knowing her personally I know her to be a good Christian and a good person), but I think that all Christians need to meditate long and hard on what you have to say as well, Shane. As a bisexual Christian, I am proud to see more churches, Christian organizations, and Christian individuals realizing that God can bless homosexual unions just like He can bless heterosexual unions. That being said, there is so much more work to be done within the Christian community in order to allow us all to move past heterosexism, sexism, racism, ableism, classism, cissexism, ageism, classism, and all other types of prejudice in order to more fully embody the teachings of Christ.

Thanks, Kathleen. While I appreciate the viewpoints on reconciling Christianity with being LGBTQ, my question is more fundamental than that. Your point on the Christian community taking responsibility for its prejudices addresses that.
This radical love that Sarah talks about should be ubiquitous across all Christian individuals and congregations. If it is as powerful as she proclaims it to be, and if it is derived from one source, God, then why does it manifest itself in such different ways across different groups? How is that love reconciled with the obvious fact that so many Christians use God to justify doing tremendous harm to others? It has been politicized and turned into a weapon – love has been turned into a weapon by many Christians. The phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” is a classic example of this. It is used to deconstruct individuals and justify attacks on their very personal qualities that they may hold dear to themselves. These attacks are then dismissed in a paternalistic way: “but we still love you so it’s OK that we treat you like this”.
If God loves the individual then any supposed failings of the individual are a matter between himself or herself and God; not the congregation, not one’s neighbors, and certainly not so-called Christian politicians who craft laws that dehumanize and degrade supposedly unchristian qualities.

Hey Shane, I appreciate your willingness to engage others. I can’t begin to truly address what you are asking here, though, because anything I say will be ignorant of your personal experiences, and, as David pointed out, those experiences, subjective opinions and particular subconscious processes are generally what are driving these discussions and not a good-faith discussion on abstract or empirical truth. I would love to talk about those things but I would probably unintentionally trample your very personal concerns and, if I had to guess, that may have already happened to you in other contexts. I will say, though, that I don’t think the religious freedom legislation is about hurting anyone. I think it is the logical companion of many of the other legislative freedoms that have come to LGBTQ minorities (and both have legitimate claims within a classical liberal framework – if that’s your thing). It’s very similar to an experience I had recently where I met with a non-Christian editor for a podcast I am producing. He was concerned about what the content of my Jesus-oriented podcast would be because he didn’t want to have to lend his creative talent, time and focus to something that he legitimately believed was wrong. If he had decided to not work with us, I would have been disappointed but in no way could I think I could, or should, demand that he work with me. Nor would I, as a web developer, want to be coerced to build someone’s porn site, even though porn is a significant portion of the web and many people find it to be completely morally righteous. I, however, do not. I sincerely love every person and have no judgement for any porn stars or porn-consumers. I still believe pornography is destructive and wrong. Others disagree and that is fine. The skill to respect one’s neighbor, even while vehemently disagreeing with their convictions, is necessary for the sociological sustainability of a plural society. Much love to you, dude!

Hi Shane, I’ll simply say to take things at face value. If a ‘Christian’ doesn’t express these radical selfless qualities she described, then that person does not in fact know the Christ which those who have been changed do.

Isn’t God the most dangerous idea ever invented by human beings? The re-enforcement of prejudice and fear and the creation of mind-forged manacles, which imprison the human mind and spirit. And again, it is that we live and move and have our being in … that which cannot be named, for God is no thing, not a being and not a bigger person. All this is very important.

Another thing of importance is that Jesus did not ask anyone to become Christian, He did say believe in him, follow him – leave all the false selves and find the true self. So, if we let go of our sexuality, our gender, our national identity, our status, our learning, even our personality – absolutely everything, we’ll find our self – our humanity. Being human, being ourselves, is what matters surely, not being Christian. Finding the authority of God within is surely knowing the Spirit of Truth.

So, I see that Jesus gives to us the dream of God, of the one human family – of justice through peace. He gives to us a heart of compassion and perhaps we might come to see the source of all as the Father who becomes our source, meaning we are born from above.

The point is to deconstruct all that we believe and in faith journey in uncertainty because certainty is the opposite of faith and must be resisted at all costs.

So if the Gospel challenges some of our desires, the Gospel should be reinterpreted and anyone who fails to go along needs to be re-educated? No, thanks. I’ll let God be God, and remain a sinner in need of repentance.

While Christians do have many failings and the failure to love his/her neighbour not the least of them I would still say that we are not kept in the place of God. I also understand that we Christians sometimes err with respect to truth. We want to be lovers of God and loves of our fellow neighbours. But please do also understand that we need to be lovers of truth as written down in the Scriptures also.

If as we claim the Bible is true then we Christians have understood marriage as the sexual (but not limited to) union of one man and one woman. Homosexuality is condemned as sin. We do believe in a God who forgives sin, who empowers us to be victorious over our sins, and who also waits patiently for us to come to a place of victory. But we do not believe in a God who leaves us in our sins, who teaches us to call our sins an inherent part of our personality which is to be cherished.

Now do we Christians want to send any homosexual to hell? Not at all. If hell is what it is (a place of abandonment with no presence of God, with no hope) then we want no person to be there. But then we are not the decision makers. The final arbitrator is Jesus Christ. We cannot but plead and warn men and women not to remain in their sin. If on the day we all stand before Jesus we (the orthodox, hateful Christians) are proved wrong we will accept our just sentence with humility and will be happy for all those whose lifestyle we proclaimed to be incompatible with the Word of God.

Shane, as an evangelical pastor, perhaps your misunderstanding of evangelical doctrine (biblically grounded doctrine) could explain your rejection of our perspective. The Bible says, “God is love”. 1 John 4 is a succinct description of Him and those who truly follow him.
It is not Christ or His love (or followers) who must reconcile to society. The opposite is true. God is love and His word (Bible) is His standard for knowing Him, creation, and other humans. It is based on love and any behavioral boundaries set up in that standard are there to protect the integrity of His creation which includes human society. Therein is the problem. It is society’s refusal to conform that sets itself against Him…not the other way around.

Hi Shane. Just curious… when you say, “not what I see espoused by Evangelical pastors; the Catholic clergy; particular congregations, large and small…”, have you actually gone to physically listen to and talk with these individuals, or are you viewing things through the lens of the internet or other media?

The problem you may find is that you are trying to meet God on your terms. God is a thrice-Holy God and as broken people we can only commune with him with a contrite spirit, a broken heart and the resolution of repentence. Grace to you.

Sin is sin and as we go back to Adam and Eve, they hid from God. They knew they had done wrong. I love this that God did not wait for them to say sorry but came looking for them and when He discovered them he had compassion on them and His Grace and mercy He took part of His wonderful Creation and sacrificed for each individual on their behalf. Why? Was a fig leaf not good enough. It was not enough for them to overcome their sin. They were already using the fig leaf to hide. God provided a covering for them and a blood sacrifice as payment that them could have relationship restored with Him. They deserved to die but a blood sacrifice was made on their behalf. The result of sin is death. They could not undo what they did. God rescued them. The consequences of sin have played out on all humanity. God has provided a way, He has and is, for those who choose to be born again through the second Adam, Jesus Christ. I pray this is enough for you to investiagte the truth of God and His love. Seek Him personally. In failure we ” all have sinned and fallen short of the Kingdom of God” read Romans 3 and 6 to get verses in context. The truth in love is this jersus camre to love, heal and forgive and we need to also.
Just maybe you can take the first step to forgive your Mum. Failure of the individual or failure of God! It is SIN! ” “God is light in Him there is no darkness at all”1 John 1:5. How can we have fellowship with Him? Q: What would happen if a murderer kept on murdering ? How then do we look at other sin?

The Adam and Eve story is interesting. The fact is, until they ate of the fruit, they could have not known what was evil and what was good…..so they had no way to make an educated choice. Both choices would have been equal to them.

It seems that Sarah turned to Christianity because it more conveniently fit the values that she held dear. While this often is appealing, just as many atheists turn away from Christianity because they like “being in charge of themselves,” these sorts of initiators towards new ideologies should be heavily scrutinized, as they speak more towards one’s comfort in ideas rather than the actual truth of them. (Of course, I’m sure she analyzed the ‘truth’ of it a bit more in her further research).

I’ve been following this tread and if I may, can I question some of your assumptions?

It seems you want a God who would intervene in every illness, every injustice, every bit of suffering (including non-man-made ones, Tsunamis etc). That sounds like you want a perfect world! If that is the case, then what would a God who created a perfected world do with all the imperfect people?

Interestingly enough, the Bible does talk about God ending all injustice and suffering in the world (which is what Sarah said in her last paragraph). Even though you don’t believe in God, does it not seem plausible that a God who has power over life and death can physically bring people back to life (in a perfect world)? Can punish all injustices (which is what makes us rage when we think of children being raped)? And can show us how suffering, even though we don’t see it presently, makes sense?

The issues you raise about suffering were all raised in the Old Testament book called Job (thought to be one of the earliest books in the Bible). So your difficulty with why a God would allow suffering is not new one but one the Bible actually tackles itself.

The God of the Bible is not saying you should hold on to a blind faith in a utopia. He demonstrates that what He will do when He physically raised Jesus from the dead, never to die again. He claims to be in control of the world. The only answer He gives as to why He hasn’t already intervened decisively is because when He does intervene, finally and irrevocably, people will have no more time to turn to Jesus and repent but will have to face His Justice (You can read this in the 2nd book of Peter chapter 3).
Please hear me rightly (writing can be so difficult), I’m not playing the ‘fear and hell and damnation’ card as a way of scaring you rather than dealing with your argument. I’m saying you are demanding justice of God, if there is one. And so you expect Him to intervene. But what if His way of intervening is one that marries both love and justice? Opportunity to repent and enjoy Him both in this world and in one when it’s renewed vs giving us what we all deserve.

Please don’t reply with a glib answer like ‘tell that to the starving children in Africa’ or the like. Because most of them do believe in God. It’s often we in the West who think that in the face of suffering people cannot or will not believe.
If I’ve engaged you rationally, please reply. If I’ve only enraged you, thank you for at least reading through this long reply.

If God doesn’t exist it doesn’t matter. Either way, the free wills of two individuals–while perhaps of equal value–are exerted in priority of the means and leverage which those respective agents have. The rapist free-will overrides the child because they are stronger and there is no environmental constraint against doing so. Whether from a purely naturalistic perspective or a theistic one, it is an irrelevant point. Why would God be responsible to restrain whatever you arbitrarily conceive as the evil actions of human beings? Christianity is the only religion that gives anything on that question, and the explanation is internally consistent with the full system of the worldview.

Humans rape, murder, rob, and exploit each other in every imaginable way. That is a fact. Only a theistic worldview provides any means of validating that such things are objectively wrong: that they ought not to happen. If you are not a theist, but a naturalistic materialist, then this behavior would be expected as part and parcel with survival of the fittest. If you are a theist, then you are left with exploring the issue of what evil is, why it exists, and what is God doing about it. Christianity answers all of these questions quite directly, consistently, and comprehensively. The real question, which brings us back to the author’s experience, is this: why do atheists–and moreover all people–feel overwhelmingly compelled and operate under the presumption that objective moral values exist if there is no basis to merit such claims?

So if someone comes from an atheistic/naturalistic framework arguing against theism on the basis of moral qualms, that argument rationally invalidates itself.

CD – imagine if you had the power to prevent a rapist from brutally raping a child without any risk to yourself or to anyone else. Would you prevent the rape or would you sit there and do nothing? To be a good person, you would have an obligation to prevent the rape. That is how it is concluded God – if he exists – has an obligation to prevent the rape.

I strongly suggest you watch this video. It will help this make more sense to you.

He already has intervened, except it was at great harm and cost to Himself. This is the work of the cross. Evil has been dealt with from the eternal vantage, and in the future will be removed altogether. The little suffering we endure in this life is minuscule to the joys of eternity in Christ. Moreover, pain, evil, and suffering all play an important role to bring the state of humanity to our attention. If everything were perfect (which they would be if God directly intervened in every act of evil this world endures), then we would perceive no need of a savior for humanity and the world itself. Pain is necessary for survival in this broken world, and is the consequence of evil for which we ourselves are responsible.

I am interested in your qualifier regarding “without any risk to anyone or yourself.” How does that play out, exactly? Can you see all ends? Can you perceive the past, present, and future and understand the eternal ramifications of this or that? How do you know that helping one will not result in the harm of another? Or that to help one may hurt the whole? The Father turned His back on His only begotten Son, Jesus, who was blameless and perfect, and permitted Him to endure the worst imaginable suffering–physically, emotionally, and spiritually–for the sake of the eternal salvation of humanity at large. Why then is this of any significance in light of that reality?

It’s quite simple when you take into account the Christian understanding of sin. Go read the epistle of Romans if you genuinely want to try to understand this issue. At the end of the day, all humans are absolutely evil and God-hating by default from birth, and with no way to personally rectify this state. Thankfully, evil people can still do good things. If everyone is indeed evil, then God is–no matter how benevolent–obligated to do anything for them. God owes us nothing. We deserve much more than the evil that is permitted to happen to us. The Gospel is the answer to this problem: He graciously (and at inconceivable cost) provided the means to give us rebirth into the goodness of Christ, and thus mend the chasm between God and man.

The problem with these discussions about God and evil are that they seldom consider attempting to evaluate it from a theocentric perspective, but rather an exclusively anthrocentric perspective. Rather than grumble that God wouldn’t do this or that, why not be grateful for the fact that we haven’t completely destroyed each other yet? Common grace–that evil, while present, remains restrained and good things happen to bad people (i.e. everyone)–is more than testament to God’s benevolence. Everyone feels entitled. All this drivel and personal incredulity is nothing more than petulant whining. An internally consistent explanation of these issues is laid out very clearly in the Bible, as conveyed by Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Notably Romans deals with this issue extensively. You are welcome to do your due diligence and read it for yourself.

As for the child and rapist analogy, the child isn’t specifically guilty for the act of rape–obviously that falls exclusively to the rapist. However, the child is just as evil in God’s eyes as the rapist in the absolute sense of moral attribute. The notable point is that God loves both, in spite of their evil. That is the message that Christianity preaches: that God is love, and even the rapist can find redemption, forgiveness, and love in His mercy just as much as a child can.

Thanks Milton. I see the Christian view of God as all knowing, all powerful and all present. Another view of “God’s” role in the “Child rape” scenario is that God suffers with the child, not complicit with the crime but also a victim. The crime or the action is never what was intended in a perfect world.

The Christian God, according to the Christian belief, watched his “son” (a human manifestation of himself?) be mistreated and killed in an horrific manner. But the Christian story does not end there, it ends with good news, victory over evil. The son did not remain dead but was alive and out of the tomb three days later, according to Christian belief.

At this point I am a temporal being, but I look forward to an eternity. My choice is to be with God for an eternity as he intended, with no suffering or pain, or an eternity separated from God.

Phil, If I already responded , then this is redundant and I apologize.

You left out omnibenevolent, but you may not think this is one of his attributes.

If he was all knowing, as you say, then he had foreknowledge of the results of the system he designed. This means he is responsible for any and all evil arising from the system. There is no way around that.

If the Jesus stories are true, then Jesus lost absolutely nothing. His death was in no way a substitution. Look at the facts…….He rose again in three days, became immortal, sat at the right hand of a god, and was destined to rule the world. Please explain how that in any way equates to the human experience of death.

I don’t know if you subscribe to the Trinitarian view, but if you do, then it becomes even more absurd. That would mean that god sacrificed himself to himself to circumvent rules he himself put into place.

I appreciate your feedback, Phil. I try to be pointed with my answers without being offensive. It is a hard line to toe.

Thanks for more questions, and I apologise for my tardiness in replying.
I fully agree with your second paragraph about God’s foreknowledge.
There is more to the Jesus story, it is not only about death and resurrection. Prior to his death he lived for 30 years, thereabouts. He had a following due to his alleged authority and power for a period of roughly three years, recorded by eye witnesses and a man who decided to record a careful history.
A man who was able to heal, raise people from the dead, teach religious leaders, calm storms, send pigs to drown, turn water into wine is quite impressive. These stories, over 1900 years later, require faith to believe.
As I ponder the death of Jesus I am struck by the torture and death. The friends that carefully laid his body in a borrowed tomb and the women that came to care for his body on the third day.
If Christian teaching is true, he did not just die, but actually descended to the world of the dead (separate from “God the father”) and then showed that death was powerless and defeated Satan (the accuser, Lucifer, the great angel who was expelled from God’s presence.

With regards to omnibenevolent, I am not convinced. He loved the world (Jn 3:16), he desires not the death of a sinner (Ezek 18:32), he generously loved and forgave but allows people to reject him (free will). Actually, the term omnibenevolent was new to me on this thread and I am still contemplating it.

Personally, I think that it is quite possible that a person named Jesus existed. There is certainly no definitive proof, but there is anecdotal evidence. For me the question is demonstrating that he was also a deity, or son of a deity (depending on which type Christian you may be).

There are really no eye witnesses, we don’t even know who actually wrote the gospels, and they are written in the third person. The very earliest one was written some thirty years after the supposed crucifiction.

It is also a fact that eye witness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of testimony. That is why forensics is so important in major criminal trials.

Furthermore, the supposed miracles are at the level of modern day parlor tricks and are unimpressive even if it were possible to demonstrate that they actually happened. If you are a deity trying to leave an impression, you don’t feed a few thousand wirh a few fish, you end hunger worlwide. You don’t turn water into wine at a party, you provide clean safe drinking water for mankind.

Finally, if you are a deity that wishes all mankind to believe, worship, and obey you, your form of communicating that should not be a collection of stories with questionable authorship and internal inconsistencies written in a language that was all but extinct for hundreds of years and is readable by only a fraction of the world’s population unless translated into a myriad of other languages.

Thank you Milton.
I am not sure whether you have actually read the gospels or the book of Acts?
The gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts clearly include elements of first person account. Indeed there is a transition in the Book of Acts which changes from “history” to “eye witness account”, it is quite fascinating that the text changes during Acts 20, verses 1 – 6 from “he did this” etc. to “we”. This is one example of Luke’s record which are two books of his research into the life of Jesus of Nazareth and his messengers.
John likewise makes an autobiographical comment in John 20:24.

I would dispute your assertion about eye-witness testimony insofar as persons involved in an event verses persons that perceived an event. The Watergate Scandal is a case where a number of men were all involved. Chuck Colson http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2112776,00.html recalls the events and declared that:
“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”

Phil, yes, I have read the old and new Testaments several times through. It admittedly has been quite some time, though. When I said the four gospels weren’t written as first person, I was referring to the crucificion and resurrection, specifically. But even if they were written in first person from beginning to end, it would provide questionable evidence at best.
However, even Biblical scholars agree generally that we have no idea who the authors of some of the gospels are and that in some instances, one borrows from the other. So we can’t even be certain of the authorship, with the possible exception of one of them.

If the fact that some people died for what they believed makes the belief true, then it would make Islam true, as well as Hinduism, Bhuddism, and numerous other religions. People die to this day for various religious and political ideologies, that does not establish the truthfulness of their beliefs.

You can Google the accuracy of eyewitness accounts and find ample information demonstrating the questionable value of eyewitness accounts. The guilty go free and the innocent are convicted based on eyewitness accounts. For such a claim as people rising from the grave, far more evidence would be needed to substantiate the claim.

The claim that men broke into an office is a much lower claim than the claim of a man who was a god, or a god’s son rose from the dead, or that a virgin gave birth, etc.
All claims are not equal in terms of weight, and therefore the quantity and quality of evidence needed to support the claims also will vary.

If the only claim was that there was a man with the name of Jesus who lived in the middle east 2 thousand years ago, perhaps the gospels would suffice, because such a claim could easily be true and would carry little importance. But when you throw in the miracles and god claims, the bar is raised substantially.

It is the difference between me telling you there was a car in my garage or telling you there was a magical dragon in my garage.

Milton, thank you so much for your reply.
A few years ago I realised that caring for a person was far more convincing and compelling than arguing with them. But, I do not feel that you and I are arguing in the negative sense.
There is no point in us discussing technical details back and forth as every claim that we each make can be rebutted by a counter claim.
Thank for reminding me that, if I truly believe that Jesus is the son of God, and that God exists, it is more powerful for me to live as one who learns from and follows him (i.e. heals, feeds, cares for) rather than one who argues.

The narrative of Jesus records a man who loved the outcast and took the religious leaders to task. He was not impressed with knowledge, he was impressed with care and service.

Thank you for reminding me to serve and care more and to “argue” less.

“If you are not a theist, but a naturalistic materialist, then this
behavior would be expected as part and parcel with survival of the
fittest.”
Don’t bring poor Darwin into this. The behaviour is expected, but that doesn’t mean we have to be OK with it. The whole of human civilization and culture fights against natural selection.

We can certainly build a moral framework based on human relations (using the Golden Rule, for example, which antedates Christianity and is common to many cultures) without invoking a deity at all. It isn’t absolute, but then, if there were no humans, there would be no need for one. For example, if another species were dominant, that reproduced by some other means, the concept of rape might be meaningless. It is only a crime in a human society that values autonomy. (We may note in passing that the Abrahamic concept of rape is deeply flawed, treating it as a crime against a man’s [father’s or husband’s] property, and the OT [Deut 22:28-9] and Islam both offer the solution of marrying the rapist!)

“Christianity answers all of these questions quite directly, consistently, and comprehensively.”
Oh really? Christians are very ready to thank God for finding them a parking palce or saving one person in a plane-crash, but not to blame Him for letting the plane-crash – or a tsunami killing hundreds of thousands – happen. There are many evils (relative to humans) that are not human-made, “acts of God”. The story of the miracle of the blind man only underlines the problem: sure, you may say God blinded him “so that the works of God [Jesus restoring his sight] might be displayed in him” but he was still blind till then, and that’s cold comfort for all other blind people.

In light of the culture of the time, forcing the man who raped the woman to marry her was culturally appropriate as both a solution and a disincentive to rape. Women who were raped would become bywords of society, not unlike some of the cultural issues that we have with this to this day, “she deserved it, she was asking for it, etc.” A woman shamed in that culture would never be sought by suitors, and thus never marry or produce offspring, which would bring great dishonor to herself, her family, and her tribe. Having the rapist marry her would be compensatory to the irreparable damage he caused to her. Men knowing that they would be forced into a marriage with a woman that may be below his station or ambitions would disincentivize him from raping her in the first place. It is also worth noting that if he would not marry her he would be stoned to death.

As for Islam, I will not comment on that as I am not a Muslim and I find Islam to be an abhorrent religion.

All of what you articulated there goes back to the main point of the author and the beginnings of her pursuit of God: why should we value these things? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Evolutionary sociological and psychological arguments fail miserably to deal with this, and philosophy takes ardent note of that. From the Christian evaluation, the suffering of this life is infinitesimal compared to the glory of eternity to come. And the suffering of this life is necessary to point us toward God and to terms with the fallen state of humanity and the creation at large.

Yes I read that apologia when I was checking the chapter and verse, and it’s still a disgustingly chauvinist view of the value of women. I notice that you let God make the rule to suit the society (why don’t we still force women to marry their rapists?) but absolve him from any role in setting up such a chauvinist society.

Chapter and verse for the stoning, please. My reading was that he would just have to pay the bride price without getting the bride.

“The whole of human civilization and culture fights against natural selection” – why Hugh7? Why would we fight against what is, according to you, essentially who we are? it is illogical. Just as illogical as saying that we strive for good for one another, for *civilization* which means order, structure, rules – that is directly contradictory to a naturalistic materialist mentality. People who we call utterly unethical and selfish (probably depraved since literally *anything* goes) are actually the epitome of what “natural selection” would entitle them to be – doing what they want and getting what they want out of their life no matter what and rising to the top of whatever power system is in place.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what natural selection is. It doesn’t “entitle” anything, it is/was just the way that life survived, by adapting to different habitats and over aeons producing a diversity that boggles the mind, and showed Darwin the inadequacy of creationism as a theory. (You seem to think it involved constant physical battles between individuals or species, or tribes, or something. Nothing of the sort.)

Human consciousness changes everything. That is why we don’t say the other animals are “immoral”.

Actually no I don’t. Apart from the ridiculous concept that you can just “add time” to the equation (aeons) and there will result in a change of matter and intelligence. The concept that Darwin posited, which was flawed in a number of sense was simply a derivation of earlier work by a man who (like many men) do not want to accept that they are a created being, and thus accountable to their creator (whether we wish to be, choose to be, or not – it just is). I am still figuring out how you believe I said “it involved constant physical battles between individuals or species, or tribes, or something” The concept of natural selection is a *belief* that species would adopt (not adapt which is different) various traits which help them survive better, and these traits held by survivors of a species would rise to the top and be passed onto offspring (which, as an aside is of course absolute bunkum because no species has, or ever will, add more intelligence to their DNA, and no amount of time added to the equation changes that, and the irreducible complexity of design in myriad biological applications shows such gradualism as nonsense). As such there is no need for ethics, morality or such, because survival is the only criteria. Indeed, if that’s the case, why should we even have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, of ethics and morals from birth – which it has been established that we do?

I am not sure why anyone who has the simplest understanding of an infinite Creator can ignore the reality that the Creator is thus capable of creating endless amounts of diversity and complexity, and creating a system which develops as such and sustains such incredible diversity and complexity – so for Darwin to think that, we realise that Darwin wasn’t much of a thinker. He just can’t conceive a Creator that (ironically, by definition) is beyond the conception of the creation.

It’s even more pathetic that he adapted an even more hair brained notion that something can come out of nothing, just just got to add more time to the equation. I mean, really!

And this is not an argument against the existence of God, but of the Christian God specifically. But, again, Christianity specifically deals with this. As for the creation, God created it for the purpose of humanity and human free will. Though what we are discussing here is not an issue of free will, but restraint. Free will is a matter of the ability to make fully autonomous decisions. Restraining those decisions being carried out is another thing altogether. It’s the matter of the assertion of will that is at play here.

I am arguing against the existence of the Christian god, because the author specifically references the Christian god. If you wish to argue the pros and cons for any one of the thousands of other gods, we can, but not within this thread.

Demonstrate your assertion that a god created the universe for humanity and free will. does human free will supersede the will of your god?

I was just making an observation on that matter. I know you are arguing against the true God. How would you like me to demonstrate it? What criteria would you like fulfilled? It would probably be faster for you to just go and read the accounts.

How to demonstrate that a god exist (true or otherwise) is a very good question, CD.

My answer would be that an omniscient god would know what that evidence would be in my case. So i will await his submission of that evidence. In the meantime, i have no reason to believe.I think that is fair.

Fair enough. A book I have found to be helpful in these dialogues is “Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism,” by Timothy Keller. I would recommend it to you. I will pray that God will reveal Himself to you on the grounds that are necessary for you.

I will leave you with the words of Jesus on the matter of finding God:

“Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them—this is the Law and the Prophets.
“Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.”

Matthew 7:7-14 (Holman Christian Standard Bible)

If you will concede the possibility that He is there, and if so you would wish to find Him, then He will most surely find you.

Milton, your thinking is still fundamentally anthropocentric, and more specifically Milton-centric.

On the justice of suffering:
(1) All humankind is in rebellion (explicit or otherwise) against its creator.
(2) The punishment for this is its natural consequence: God partially gives us what we want – a world where his presence and justice is distant or non-existent.
(3) In this age, God’s justice is partial as a mercy and warning: humans are foolish and evil and whatever they try to do by their own efforts turns to evil – turn back to God.
(4) It is also uneven: some evil and powerful prosper, the weak suffer. This is not a mistake; it too is a lesson in human evil and call to repent.
(5) All this is but a foretaste of what is to come, where evil will be utterly cast out from God’s presence.
(6) Humans, being natively evil and rebellious, can do nothing to escape this final justice except throw themselves of the mercy of God.

Why do hundreds die in natural disasters? Why are children mistreated and slain? You and me and people just like us. Why does God not step in and stop it? He will. But in the meantime he wants us to recognise our utter general culpability and turn to him for mercy. Yet we would rather blame him for giving us exactly what we (corporately) asked for – to rule ourselves and our world in our own way.

Now, there are half a dozen possible objections to this. But if any of them hold, then we are in a worse place – if there is no God who will judge, then there is no justice, no right, no wrong. These are all things we make up to try to make ourselves feel better in a dog-eat-dog world.

As for evidence of God, why do you assume the problem is a lack of evidence? There are none so blind as those who will not see. God doesn’t owe you (or me, or CD, or Sarah, or anyone else) salvation, or evidence, or anything else other than judgement. But he does offer some of us two gifts – the gift of realisation that we need him, and the gift of salvation. For those he gifts with the first, the second follows easily. Perhaps in his mercy and plan he will offer them to you.

“Why doesn’t God deal with me on my terms?” is a condemnation of the asker, not God.

Finally, let me observe that when the Apostles speak in public (in the book of Acts), their ultimate focus in not on the crucifixion of Jesus but on his resurrection. To their thinking, the resurrection of the Christ is the sign that he is King and the judgement of God is coming upon the world (Acts 2:34-40, Acts 17:29-31). The (apparent) reign of ignorance and evil is coming to an end; do not be caught up in its fall. God in his mercy offers you a way back to him.

Andrew it’s nice to see a fleshed-out reply. You have actually put thought into your reply.
Unfortunately, I disagree with your reasoning. My main point is that if god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent then he has both the ability and the desire to end immorality. He does not. Is he is incapable or unwilling?

It is irrelevant that he may step in at some point in the future and stop it. The point is that he can stop it now and chooses not to. Therefore, if he exists, he is immoral.

Let me give my original question to you, because virtually everyone else on this thread has dodged the question and not answered it. Maybe you will be the first to have the courage.

If you could stop a child from being raped without any risk to you or others, would it be immoral not to stop it?

If you think it is moral, I would like you to give me the justification for your belief.

If you think it is immoral, then you and I agree….but your god has some explaining to do, because he does not prevent it.

If I could stop a child from being raped, without any risk to myself or others, would it be immoral for me not to stop it? Yes. In accordance with human conceptions of morality, it would be immoral for me to stand idly by. Is God bound by human conceptions of morality? Of course not, no more than a parent is bound by what their young/naive child deems fair or just. Why doesn’t God prevent any child rape from taking place? How do you know He doesn’t? A rape that God stopped wouldn’t have happened…so nobody knows about it! 🙂 What if every time our ‘conscience’ convinces us not to do something we know to be wrong, it is (as is preached in the Catholic Church) God’s voice stepping in & telling us “no”? Doesn’t a loving parent sometimes have to step back & allow their child to make wrong, sometimes harmful choices, so that they can learn from their mistakes, with the parent being there to pick up the pieces & love them back to wholeness, when they are ready for that to happen (e.g. a child who is abusing drugs & destroying their bodies & lives)? Don’t many people find the way to heal themselves & their lives only when they have reached absolute rock bottom, & someone has been there to love them back to wholeness? In response to your repeated question, as someone who WAS the child, I tell you, the pain exists only while human notions of worth/shame/blame/violation etc. etc. etc. apply. With God’s unceasing love, value of each life etc. comes complete healing. Did evil break me? Yes, but only until I allowed myself to be loved back to wholeness. The Bible teaches us that demons & evil do exist. When human beings follow their lead, rather than God’s, pain & suffering abound. Yet God’s love is there to heal every hurt for those who are ready to receive it.

Why do children starve to death? Not by God’s hand! There is ample food to provide for every being on Earth. Look into the vast amounts of perfectly good food disposed of every day because of its aesthetics (bananas are a great example!). Why is all of this perfectly good food thrown away? Because consumers in the developed world don’t want to buy oddly-shaped bananas, which would reduce profits if they were put on the shelf & left to rot. Why isn’t this food provided to the starving? Because it is a financial drain to transport this food to the starving, when they cannot pay even a cent towards the cost, significantly impacting profits. Children don’t starve to death throughout the world because God hasn’t provided them food, children starve to death because capitalism ripped food further out of their reach & told them they can have it when they can buy it back!

In fairness, the vast majority of those in the world who are starving are not doing so because of “capitalism”, but because of wars and violence and corruption that destroy their means of producing and obtaining food. “Capitalism” is by no means innocent, but there are very few places in the world where giving up capitalism has resulted in fewer people in poverty (see just about any “communist” country as an example).

True, re: wars, etc. Though, again, there is enough food in the capitalist, developed world to provide for those in these situations also; it is just not profitable to do so, & capitalism values profits above humanity (hence all of this food still going in the bin every day, rather than going to the hungry). As far as communism is concerned, it works very well in theory, but every failed example throughout history failed because of human greed in those at the centre (the greed which also causes capitalism to fail!).

No, I’m saying that we are in no greater a position to judge God’s morality than a young child is to judge ours when we say they have to eat their vegetables. As much as we might like to be, or believe that we are, we are not gods, so cannot perceive nor judge His actions (or lack thereof, depending on perception) by our own standards.

Insofar as culpability, you are skirting on the verge of a deep issue that theologians have theorised, debated & pondered for a very long time, & different denominations take different perspectives over, & that is the practical application of God’s plan. Some will suggest that God has planned our every decision before we get to make it, so that would then follow that free will is an illusion & we are actually just puppets, living out a predetermined plot line. The Bible however, says that God knows our every thought before we have them, not that He chose them for us. This shows us that He is so intimately knowledgeable of each one of us, & knows us so thoroughly, that He can predict our decisions/thoughts/feelings with great accuracy, not that He chose it all for us & now we just follow the script that He wrote. Though, as I said, many people have different perspectives on this topic – many of which make not a shred of sense to me! 🙂

To follow the logic that God is culpable for sending people into a world in which He knew the cost of our poor actions would be like saying a knife maker is culpable for designing a kitchen knife that someone used to kill somebody, or a teacher is culpable for setting a test that students would fail, if they chose not to study in preparation. We all have the opportunity to make good choices, or terrible choices. Because God gave us choice doesn’t mean the blame befalls Him – though the Bible does say that our bad choices do bring Him grief, & His passion tells us that He suffers our poor choices with us.

Something is moral or it is,not. Why would you imply it is somwhow moral for your god to allow a child to be raped, but immoral for humans to do so? The act of rape is to me immoral, and so is allowing it to happen when you could easily stop it.

Whether god stopped a rape in another instance is irrelevant. I am concerned with the ones he does not stop.

If Christians say human morals are derived from god and are objective in nature, then how can our moral standards be different? In what context is child rape moral?

To say your god would allow someone to rape a child just so the child could hit rock bottom and maybe recover sometime in the future to learn some lesson is obscene. Allowing children to be raped to teach then a lesson about life is a horrendous idea. How can you even think that could somehow be moral? Is that the best an all-loving god can do??? What about those who do not recover?

Finally, I find it odd that you are telling me you believe it is impossible for an all-knowing, all powerful being to overcome the drawbacks of a human economic system and feed starving children. If that is so, then he is surely no god. I am surprised you are proposing to limit the power of your god in such a manner. On the other hand, if he could have prevented the course of history that brought us to this point, then there would perhaps be no starving children. whatever excuse you wish to allow your god, in the end, it is he that set everything in motion with all the end results in sight, correct? If that is so, then he remains responsible for those results.

Okay…now I’m not sure whether my communication was abysmal, or if you’re intentionally misinterpreting my intended meaning to serve your own ends. I’m going to assume the former, seeing as I was contending with wrangling three young children whilst trying to communicate my perspective earlier! 🙂
I certainly do not mean to imply that a child is being forced to rock bottom in the aforementioned scenario, rather that the child (not that this only applies to children, rape is abhorrent in any situation) is the innocent victim-by product of a perpetrator’s rock bottom. It is the perpetrator, not the victim, who would be at their worst and lowest (because, let’s be honest, there are not many lower forms of depravity than this).
Obviously, I write as a human being, and my opinions and perspectives are my own, which I have formed based on my own limited understanding and life experiences. I may be dead-wrong, and as I am absolutely no theologian, I stress that my perspectives represent only myself, not my family, my church, my denomination, and certainly not Christianity as a whole. I do have a friend however, who is a very learned woman of God, and a priest. I will send her this link and see if she wishes to answer some of your questions more accurately and concisely than I will ever be able to without years of studying theology! On saying that though, here is my (completely worthless!) opinion on your further questions:
Although you have almost tried to back people into a corner to ‘admit’ that God is “immoral”, it is not going to happen. People with faith in God understand that we are nowhere near being on a level playing field with Him, so will not ever assume to judge His actions, based on our limited understanding. Not only do we have no right, but we are somewhat concerned for the state of our immortal souls! I think this is why you have had so few people directly addressing your questions, as your insistence on receiving a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ seemed like you wished to back people into a corner to concede to your views, when in actual fact, the response is something that is so hard to articulate that it seems too difficult to do so – especially to an outspoken denier.
Christians – in my experience – do not say that human morals are derived from God, but that human morals (and Western law) are derived from God’s laws (i.e. primarily the Ten Commandments, though many of Jesus’ teachings also qualify!). Human moral standards will always differ from God’s laws as we are all sinners, and stray from His plans. We are each tempted, we each question and doubt, and we each place higher value on human concerns and endeavours, and the pursuit of immediate gratification, rather than the things that really matter.
As I said above, I certainly did not mean to imply that a child would go through such an ordeal for any kind of lesson. Their suffering is as a result of the evil afflicting another individual. The act that the perpetrator is committing is their rock bottom, not the victim’s. I do however, believe that we can learn from all suffering that we experience. I know I sure have. I also posit that anyone who truly finds God can find healing of any and all things that they suffer, experience, or – the most unpopular stance – commit. What it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that any situation, no matter how base, how vile, how debilitating, can be injected with hope and eventual healing through faith; that all hurts can be healed through God.
I do not believe it is impossible for God to cure the wrongs of the world. In fact (read Revelation), He can and will, but it won’t be pretty. The Earth was created with more than enough for everyone, yet the gift to humanity of free will, along with temptation, caused all of this to crumble. To somebody who does not have faith, death is the endgame, so to think of people dying from starvation, after a life (albeit extraordinarily short in far too many cases) of suffering is unconscionable and disgusting – hence your mistrust and hostility towards faith, as God is then to blame for this. What if, to an eternal God – who knows the riches in store for us after this life – that a life of pain and suffering as a result of others’ susceptibility to evil is tantamount to an infant receiving an immunisation? It is impossibly awful whilst it happens, but the effects later will benefit and protect for a lifetime/throughout eternity? When one does not have any faith in anything outside of physical human experience, the ills of life are all that matter; they are the most important and debilitating questions in existence. When one does have faith, the ills of life are infinitely easier to bear. If you imagine the primary purpose of life as an opportunity to experience existence both with and without God, so that when you are faced with an opportunity to choose how to spend your eternity, your choice will be informed by your life experiences, the suffering of a godless world is easier to understand, endure and see through.
Now please, please don’t interpret this as a suggestion that starvation and human suffering is okay, is nothing to be concerned with, or that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with this, or try to fix it etc. I have to distance myself enormously and place this conversation on a hypothetical plane in my mind in order to have this discussion at all, as the reality of suffering and starving children throughout the world causes me significant distress. The fact that there are children in agony due to their lack of food and clean water in parts of the world, whilst people in my own small corner of the globe throw elaborate birthday parties for their dogs, sickens me. The fact that we are so privileged and safe that some will have time off school/work because they are distraught over the death of their pet, whereas elsewhere in the world a mother cannot take time out to mourn her child, lest her remaining children starve, is crushing for me. I feel the pain of these people (especially the mothers, with whom I can most strongly identify), and I try to help in my small ways, through child sponsorship and feeding some of the local poor, when I can. I also thank God every single day for the riches my family can enjoy. I see the good that many Christian and non-Christian organisations do to try to remedy the situations and alleviate the suffering, then I also see the individuals affected by greed who exploit even these organisations (most often from within). In these, I again see lives with and without God. I see that free will and life are gifts given to humanity such that we might experience existence both with and without God, and be able to make our decision at the time of judgement. I see the wide-reaching harm of sin; the enormous suffering brought on ourselves and others for our every transgression, and I ask forgiveness for mine and my family’s. I also look forward to a world that is free from all of this.

Marisa, I’m trying to see if you’ve explained what you think is the reason God doesn’t prevent things like the brutal rape of children and don’t see that you’ve provided this info. So I’d like to ask what you think is the reason we don’t have any god preventing various brutal rapes of children.

Put simply, because He doesn’t intervene in the exercising of free will, which is easily tempted and swayed by evil. He will however, always be there to pick up the pieces and to heal the hurts, as well as to allow good to come from any evil experienced. In my personal experience, my incredible hurts drove me away from the path that I was on to medicine, and instead redirected me to education. In my role as an educator, I have been given the opportunity on a few different occasions to be a tiny piece of the puzzle in helping to heal others’ hurts.

So if you had the power to prevent rapists from brutally raping children without any risk to yourself or to others, would you prevent such heinous acts? Or would you sit there and do nothing? Which of those two courses of action (or inaction) do you think would present you as a more morally sound person?

“If you could stop a child from being raped without any risk to you or others, would it be immoral not to stop it?”

The most important question here is the implicit one – what obligates me to act? What obligates *God* to act?

The Scriptures teach that our human moral sense is broken but nonetheless retains some innate sense of “good”. The Scriptures also provide instruction in “good” actions. Finally, our societies tend to instil ideas of *good* that may or may not track the above. All of the above guide that it is a “good” thing to protect the weak from being exploited by the strong. Thus, to intervene would be to do “good”, and to not intervene would be to fail to do “good”.

That said, to intervene against someone else’s evil to which I am an uninvolved party involves effort and risk. There’s direct personal risk that the oppressor might oppose my intervention. If the oppressor is powerful, I may draw persecution to myself, or even be unjustly blamed for his offence. Society might not support me in viewing the action as evil, and condemn me for “unjustly” intervening (witness persecution of anti-abortion campaigners). I might even be busy doing something else that I don’t wish to sacrifice. From a worldly perspective, there are many reasons why I might not be consider it “immoral” to fail to perform a particular “good” act. Conversely, the more social support I get for intervening, the more likely I am to go out of my way to perform it.

I’m not asking you to morally evaluate these reasons, just acknowledge the complexities from a human perspective.

What about a divine perspective?

Firstly, this is not a new question. Consider Psalm 10, a lament to God that the powerful are getting away with evil. “Why do evil doers prosper?” is a very old question, and one the Scriptures speak to.

Secondly, while we act from a very limited moral and temporal perspective, God does not. Broadly speaking, to turn a blind eye to evil that I could prevent is to condone or even participate in it. But God’s coming from a different place.

If I see one of my enemies mistreating another, am I bound to prevent it? That the strong will mistreat the weak is part of God’s divine judgement on humanity – it is a foretaste of hell, for which both persecutor and persecuted are destined without God’s mercy. Both are objects of God’s righteous wrath, and destined for death. This is the first reckoning.

But there is an alternative reckoning. God will not and cannot overlook evil, or dismiss it cheaply. Instead, Jesus, Son of God, comes to be human, to suffer as a human, to be rejected by humans, to die as a human, and to be judged by God as the innocent ideal human in place of all other rebellious evil humans. When you declare “How can you stand by and watch that happen?”, God points to the death of Jesus (Yeshua / “God Saves”). In that death, he takes the evil done upon himself. Moreover, he takes the evil suffered upon himself also. When the child cries out “how could you let that happen to me”, God points to the cross and says “In the death of my Son, I paid for his sin, and I paid for yours – repent and believe”.

For me to overlook evil is immoral. But God is not overlooking it; he is dealing with it at a level that is almost beyond our comprehension, understanding that our evil to each other is a sign of his judgement on us all, but also having a plan whereby he will not abandon us to our evil but offer salvation, wherein *he* pays the price.

Sorry, but if your god does not intervene and stop an immoral act, then he is complicit in the act. His future acts cannot unrape the child.

I think that having another person pay the penalty for your own immorality is a sick concept. If your great grandfather killed someone, would you think it fair that they put you in prison for his transgression?

As to the child rapist, he can “accept Jesus” and be saved, therefore avoiding any penalty.

No, that is the response of a man who is truly unaware of his own depravity. I answered your question, and you complain about it because my answer holds you (and I) as guilty as the hypothetical rapist.

We humans have a wonderful moral system. We move a safe distance below the moral behaviour that we are willing to admit to, draw a fuzzy line, and call everything below that line “evil”. Anything above that line ranges from “not too bad” to “good” depending on how we are feeling on the day and how it impacts us.

God has a slightly different system. He starts with his own perfection, compares that to his rebellious, treasonous creation, and withdraws from us because he does not want to destroy us utterly. “There is no-one righteous, not even one / there is no-one who understands / no-one who seeks God. / All have turned away / they have together become worthless / there is no-one who does good / not even one” (Rom 3:10-12 NIV).

Even the very act of thinking of ourselves as “not too bad” is morally offensive to God. “Every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood” (Gen 8:24). We’re not “not too bad”; we’re completely depraved and deluded.

“I think that having another person pay the penalty for your own immorality is a sick concept. If your great grandfather killed someone, would you think it fair that they put you in prison for his transgression?”

Well, many cultures have had some variant on that. Sometimes it’s informal (holding grudges), sometimes more formal.

And yet there’s a truth here. It really is stunningly offensive that God’s Son would take our punishment. Imagine deliberately giving up your life to save the rotting remains of a potato man you crafted when you were 4 years old; it’s hard to tell whether it demonstrates sentiment or just crass folly. But then consider the moral offence, where the righteous is not only punished *for* the guilty, but his execution is carried out *by* the guilty.

Until we grasp just how vast is the moral gulf between us and God, until we can wrap our heads around the moral fact that this world, as corrupt and evil as it is, represents a temporary *mercy* based on what we truly deserve, our moral philosophising is on par with the sounds of bunch of 8 year old boys in a farting competition.

I’m not saying that our day-to-day evil doesn’t matter. It does. But I am saying that, in the scheme of things, our day-to-day evil is not unique – rather, it demonstrates and confirms that we really are cosmically evil.

The good news is that the offence of the cross is also the means of God’s mercy for our salvation.

1) Demonstrate this is true without using bible stories.
2) So god allow immorality and evil even though he has the power to stop it. then he is immoral for doing so.
3)So god allows children to be raped for a greater good. Then he is immoral for doing so.
4. This is precisely what you would expect if there was no god determining outcomes. it provides evidence toward the non-existence of your god.
5) Perhaps, but in the meantime, your god is acting immorally.
6) Provide evidence for this assertion outside of Bible stories, please.

I’m not using “bible stories”; I’m lifting philosophical arguments from Scripture. I admit that there’s a degree of raw assertion, here. If you have a way of testing these claims that doesn’t itself rely on raw assertion I’m happy to hear it.

Otherwise, I’ll take my philosophical assertions as having greater explanative power than the alternative.

Your responses to 2,3 and 5 carry no weight whatsoever. Either they are using a different moral system, in which case you’ve changed the topic of discussion to your moral system and a Christian moral system is a priori excluded, or you’re trying to tell God that he doesn’t understand his own moral system, which will get you as far as it gets anyone else who tries to argue with the umpire, especially if that umpire is also the rule maker and also all powerful.

4 is cute, but all it proves is that we agree on the base facts of #4. If I say that fairies boil water, and you say that giants blowing bubbles boil water, showing that the water boils proves nothing either way, since we already agree on that.

You’re making the classic two thousand year old mistake – trying to argue the morality of God while denying the total depravity of man. There are two bulletproof solutions to the “problem of evil” – either we deserve it, or evil doesn’t really exist (there are no moral standards). Neither allows for the inherent goodness of mankind (or at least the subset that includes “us”), which is why we desperately seek alternatives despite their philosophical weakness.

Anyway, at this point you’re denying the conclusions not analysing the arguments. If you want to argue for a moral system which will affirm the goodness of man, the floor is yours.

Christians argue that their god values free will above the well being if his creation. My argument was pointing out that such a god evidently places the free will of the offender above that of the victim as well.

Hugh7,
Three objections occur to me:
First, It is not clear that the need for free will on the part perpetrators should supersede the need to prevent unjust suffering on the part of their victims–always, sometimes, or as often as seems to be the case.
Second, according to the Bible, God DOES occasionally intervene in the lives of his creations and thus implicitly deny their free will. He even does this directly when he “hardens Pharaoh’s heart” in the Exodus narrative. Thus, you need to explain why God, in his compassion, doesn’t intervene in all this other cases where atrocities are allowed to continue. “Because free will” just doesn’t cut it, especially if there is no accounting for exceptions.
Third, Believers are constantly praying precisely that God will intervene in the lives of His creations, thus implicitly denying the free will of agents in those cases where prayers are supposedly answered in a positive way. This seems to be to be a case of “kettle logic,” where the assorted premises of the position in question are logically inconsistent with each other. How can you have it both ways?

That’s a false dichtomy – intervention or interaction doesn’t of itself deny anyone free will.
And yet on the other side of this argument, people blame God for the results of human actions and calls him unloving because he doesn’t stop the decay and destruction that human behaviour brings about.
First one has to define what free will is (and that’s a hugely thorny topic) and to what extent and in what areas we have free will. We can’t choose not to breath. We can choose to be with God or not, but we can’t choose to opt out of this universe. We can choose to ignore him, and say he doesn’t exist. We get to choose on what terms we live in this life, but we can’t choose on what terms we live in the life hereafter. We can’t choose not to be born, not to be soulful and spiritual creatures, because that’s what we are.

That is interesting. I do believe God is quite the interventionist. God intervened in the life of His creation not only when He created us but when He saved us creating the way to be right with Him.

1 John 4:9-10 “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

the intervene you speak of here (rape, catastrophe, starvation)—can be answered in C.S. Lewis’s book, “the Problem of Pain”….. go forth and read this book and gain + 8 to wisdom and willpower and + 3 to charisma …..

No, your crabbed and hidebound viewpoint is that any being that allows any evil to happen is malevolent. This is entirely your own opinion, based on you limiting yourself to the earthly, human effects of any action. There are lots of people who claim,that in an odd way, getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. There are people who suffered unimaginably yet say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Your reasoning is shallow.

I disagree, Tyler. What was the thing gained by the child that was raped? What was the big lesson formthe millions of children that starve to desth or die from horrible diseases every year? What was the big lesson for a quarter million people swept away by a tsunami?

You assume that the only thing that matters is what happens here on earth. This is the atheist self referential loop. If you want to argue with religion then you must take it as it is, not cut out parts of it. Your childish imagining is that the only thing that happens is what happens on earth, as if God should be some sort of Big Mommy in the Sky.

Milton, I’ve had similar experiences in which Christians refuse to answer these difficult questions. The likely reason is they’ve been caught in a case of cognitive dissonance, realizing that an honest answer is going to hurt another argument they’ve made. So they try to defuse the query by employing a red herring. IMO, the best counter attack is to keep repeating the question until they admit their tenuous position.

Annie – It could be for one of a number of reasons or a combination of those reasons. Among those that come to mind are anger, hatred, greed, lack of compassion, revenge, mental illness, lack of empathy, sadism, etc.

As for suffering which occurs as the result of natural catastrophes, it’s because no one has developed any device to detect such things ahead of time or prevent them.

I see no differnce between the rate at which evil falls upon beleivers of any religion and the rate at which it falls upon the general population, somthat does not hold up under scrutiny. Would you say that, for instance, a small child,that endured a sexual assault had that happen because the child didn’t “turn to” your god?
Do you believe that all evil is the result of your god choosing to allow evil, or only some of it? If only some, how do you objectively tell the difference?

At the end of the day, if you are capable of preventing evil and look the other way, you are complicit in the evil.

If I saw a child being raped, I would do all I could to stop it. That is the difference betwee me and your god. He does not.

Oh, trust me. Evil falls in much greater rates among people who abandon the idea of God and do whatever the hell they want. In fact, we saw some of the greatest evils fall among people who explicitly drove God out of their societies – the communists, who gloried in their atheism. As a result, they saw no problem terrorizing millions upon millions. They saw no problem killing people who were troublesome. They saw no problem in gulags and massacres. The average attendee at Sunday services commits far less crime, is involved in less of all societies problem makers such as drugs and alcohol. So we have tried that little experiment, it was called Communism and the results are in.

By and large, the people out there doing crime, whoring, taking drugs, committing armed robberies etc have little or no religious belief.

It is a well established fact that the more secular a society is, the lower the crime rates tend to be. It is also a well established fact that with regard to prison inmates, Christians represent a larger percentage relative to their percentage of the overall population than atheists represent as a percentage relative to their percent of the overall population

In either case, this of course demonstrates correlation and not causation. But then I am not claiming religion is necessarily the cause.

I am only demonstrating that it is obviously not the cure.

I would add that doing the right thing out of fear of punishment or hopes of some large reward is not morality. It is selfishness.

The problem with “You should believe because unbelievers behave badly” is that one cannot turn belief on and off like a tap (at least I can’t). One should believe or not believe based on the facts, and if it seems there is/are no god/dess/es, then one must live with that and forge an understanding of good and bad as best one can, based on the way the world really is.

I never said there is no absolute truth. I think there has to be a real universe, otherwise what is it that are we arguing about? Over the last few centuries we have discovered that reality is a lot more complicated than we thought – that everything is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space, for example. Or that space and time are more flexible than we thought.

I think we will go on discovering more and more of that kind of thing, including how we are deluded. Several people whose opinion I respect have come to the conclusion that we don’t actually have “free will”. For example we now know that we begin to move before our conscious minds have formed the intention to move. (I’m agnostic on that in the meantime. it deserves further study.)

I think no matter how much we discover, reality will always be more complicated. So I guess we can never “know an absolute reality”. But that doesn’t bother me. One thing I am reasonably sure of is that we are not going to find consciousness behind everything – and if we did, we’d have to start again, working out how that consciousness worked, where are its neurons, what it its ecology, etc. etc. It wouldn’t be an answer, only the beginnning of more questions.

Sorry Hugh7, I made an assumption that you believed in relativism, that we can never know anything ‘objectively’ because we’re subjective beings. The recent discoveries we’ve made in Science are fascinating, aren’t they! I also think we’ll continue to make amazing discoveries that we can’t even comprehend now! I believe too that we’re not a “blank slate”, even before we’re born. I don’t know enough about this either. I guess the point I differ on is that, the more we delve into understanding the universe and the world around us, the more I see God’s hand in creating it.

Romans 5:7-8
7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This dilemma is not ‘solved’ by ceasing to believe in God. You simply shift the problem of evil to the easily observable, still with no way to explain it. So you are claiming that reality itself is evil and life is not worth living for aggregate humanity.

The most miserable life that any human ever lived is but a blink of an eye compared to the timespans of heaven. Yes, some people are born into squalor and misery and torment on this planet from which they never escape–until death. But heaven is available to them, and that is for eternity.

Without the capacity to commit evil and hurt others we would not be human beings with moral agency. But through things like disease, violence, and natural disaster we are motivated to learn about the physical world around us. If there was no distress and danger in the world, what kind of science would exist? Would there be any reason for scientific research if there were no illness and no natural disaster? Do you desire a world with no problems to solve?

What is your idea of ‘a world with no evil?’ A world where every person putters around in cars, planes and boats, shopping and eating and never growing old or sick, with a little jogging and Netflix to relax or pass the time? And yet I would wager, since you have time to engage in this discussion right here, that your life is already pretty close that as it is. And yet you still view the world itself as full of inexplicable evil and torment. Are you angry at God for not making you some sort of kept animal in a video game?

“So you are claiming that reality itself is evil and life is not worth living for aggregate humanity.” What a sad world you must live in. No, reality is a mixture of good and evil, and for most of the world, the good outweighs the evil.

“If there was no distress and danger in the world, what kind of science would exist? Would there be any reason for scientific research if there were no illness and no natural disaster? Do you desire a world with no problems to solve?”
Yes, there most certainly would. First, because of our natural curiosity to find out how the universe works (a universe in which science has yet found no trace of nor need for any supernatural agency). Then because there are many issues which are not disasters. The good can be improved. The uninvented can be invented. Cellphones would still be useful even if we did not use them to summon rescue helicopters.

John, I am losing track as to who I did and did not answer. I do not see that i responded to you, so here goes:

Your claims are patently absurd. Christianity dictates that one must believe in the Christian god and in Jesus at a minimum, am i not correct? So demonstrate that those billions of people who die of starvation, and cancer, and natural disasters to the person do not fall into that category.

My idea of a world with no evil is simply a world with no evil. what do planes, cars, and boats have to do with it????????

We both have time to engage in this discussion, so whatever you wistfully apply to me, do so to yourself as well.

So, the quarter million people who lost their lives in the tsunami some time back were all killed because they did not acknowledge your god? Children starve to death in Africa because they did not accept your god (even though they may not ever have heard of him)?

God has a plan and every single human being is part of it. People died in that tsunami because spoiled cretins like me and you would rather spend time arguing with each other on the internet than developing ways to detect and alert people to natural disasters. The technology to warn and evacuate people in tsunami zones already exists. I haven’t contributed anything to research or implementation of it, but maybe that could have helped save those people. Have you contributed anything to that field of study?

Kids are starving in Africa because their parents are unable or unwilling to feed them, and because me and you are not feeding them either. How is that God’s fault?

His alternative is to deny there is a God who cares about people because some times bad things happen. Therefore he prefers a world in which child rape, etc are simply natural occurrences, which have no intrinsic moral effects. He is acting like a baby, who wants a God who prevents each and every instance of evil, everywhere, or he is not going to believe in him.

You forget that believe in God is to also believe in Satan. There is a spiritual realm and it influences everything that happens in this world, whether for good or for evil. Demons and devils and Satan hatevall of us because we are God’s creation, created in his image and because God loves us. Satan is an awful, awful individual. He is rotten and takes absolute glee in the pain and agony and atrocities that take place in this world. They are his doing. But God allows it because he created us as free, he wants us to have the choice otherwise there is no point. And at the end of set time alloted, our choices will be rewarded eternally. And we are offered an eternity, a promise, stated over and over again in the Bible where there will be no more suffering, no more pain, no more crying, no more dying, no more war, but everlasting, everlasting peace and safety. An eternity with God. Sin and satan will no longer exist or threaten to touch us.
But even now, the promise remains in Romans 8:28 that God works all things for our good. I bhave experienced this personally. There is no lose with out gain. Look at the nation of israel. They are prime example of this truth and evidence that God does exist. They have experienced some of the worst hatred and suffering than any group of people on the earth and yet they remain and maintain their faith. In God. After the holocaust, after great, great loss, because of it they gained back their homeland and then their capital and holy city. After thousands of years of exile, they made a great gain followingtheir great loss. Look at the life of Joseph. He went through tremendous tragedy and set back and in the end he said what you meant for evil, God meant for good. That is the final answer. We obviously live in a fallen and wicked world. Why should that keep us from faith? It should actually increase our faith!! Because the bible doesnt say not to expect trouble, it actually promises it. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist or doesn’t love us, it just means Satan does exist and hates us. But Christ defeated him at the cross and promises to dispose of him for good at the end of the age. Until then, we have to live in the world that he is ruler of and embrace the love of God and the promise that our pain may endure through out our lives, but joy will be ours through Christ, eternally. Ultimately, faith is listed as one of 9 fruits of the spirit. It is a supernatural thing to believe. It is not in our nature or in our surroundings, it is of God himself.

In the Problem of Pain, CS Lewis reconciles it by reconstructing the attributes of God. The problem of evil doesn’t pertain to a god which is less than OOO. For more on this, please watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmjFVP6qkiI&t=361s

I would say that it is of little to no worth, yes. Especially when one has no idea why they are suffering inexplicably. What is the “worth” in the starvation of a child to the child? What was the “worth” of the deaths of a quarter million people in a tsunami to those people who were killed?

God can, will and does intervene, especially when we seek Him. how many christians donate to or organize groups to help these exact people you refer to?? They are being the hands and feet of God, being his love in action! To believe in good, does not mean to deny evil!! It is a very real and obvious fact of life in this world.

You only have anecdotal accounts. That is wholly insufficient to support such claims. There are no medical records to consult, and no witnesses to talk to. Don’t even try to say the two are the same thing. If Jesus wanted to impress the world, he should have eliminated disease. Now that would have still resonated throughout the world.

I appreciate the good that some religious organizations do. There is no denying it, nor would i wish to. But the question of a god preventing evil is quite apart from the question of people helping others recover because he chose to allow it to happen.

All of that merely proves the existence of Satan in a fallen world. There was no such in Eden and there will be none in the New Earth. God has given us the free will to choose evil or to choose good. Which have you chosen?

No, it proves much more. Your statement implies one of two possibilities exist. 1) There is an evil supernatural being which is so powerful that your god CANNOT stop him, in which case your god is not all powerful. Or 2) your god COULD stop evil from happening but chooses not to, therefor it is malevolent.

That is the choice. He can’t stop evil or he chooses not to.

The free will question does not come into play. One cannot choose not to get cancer, or not to go blind because of a parasite infection, or choose not to be swept away by some natural disaster. A child cannot choose not to starve to death because there is no food. I am nowhere addressing whether one chooses to believe in a god or practice a religion.

Milt, these are fantastic points/questions/
Concerns. From Isaiah 45:7, this is what God says about Himself: ” I form the light and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” That’s the KJ version. That’s my God. He’s mighty, awesome, fierce, AND just. His ways are perfect. I do not understand them. I am not God. But the more I study His character, the more complex He becomes. I love your thought process. I wish I could reason/logic with you. But my God’s ways are so much higher than human reason/logic, the BEST way to know Him is through Scripture (I love OT) and by walking with Him. I wish you Shalom.

Milton,
You seem to believe that you have a unique point of view. Were you seriously seeking the answer – several people have given you suggestions for finding it. So I believe that you are not actually seeking an answer – but rather merely seeking to destroy the faith of others.

But here’s the deal.

Christ came to earth. 11 men saw him for three years – and what they saw changed their lives. They traveled the known world – baptizing with water and the holy spirit.

With difficulty, a man might give his life for his friends – but no man will give his life for something he knows to be a lie. And most of the disciples died in very difficult fashion, for the sake of the gospel. For something they had no doubt was true.

Thats the truth of the matter. The truth of Christianity is in the changed lives – not in theoretical philogenical constructs.

If you truly wish an intellectual answer to your questions – read Lewis, kiirkegard, Buber.
Your questions are not unique, and they have been answered.

Obviously God could stop evil. He could have made us all robots who do nothing but His will all the time. That is obedience, but it is not love. Unlike the Muslims, we place love above submission. The true God is a God of love and He believes His children will ultimately choose to turn to love.

But what s YOUR answer? Where is your hope? How will you stop child rapists and tsunamis?

Preventing harm to people does not in any way make the human population into robots. What he might ultimately believe is first of all unknown to anyone. A god of love would not be a god who sits by and watches immoral things happen and does nothing. It does not matter what he ma want ir do in the future. The child was raped. The tsumani killed. The hurricane killed…..if your god can stop harm and chose to do nothing, then it is a malevolent god.

I appreciate your honesty. That is the default position for humanity — misery exists and there is nothing ahead but death and rot. Jesus came to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. I choose to believe him. I understand those who choose otherwise. I was there for a very long time.

Obviously God could stop evil. He could have made us all robots who do nothing but His will all the time.

Why do Christians make this leap? This is a false choice. You seem to think EITHER God must make humans who only obey his will, all the time, merely mindless robots, OR God must allow people to starve, must allow rapists to get off with no consequences, must allow tornadoes an tsunamis and etc.

What nonsense. I believe in the police. That doesn’t mean I believe in living in a police state, or that police should monitor your every move to ensure you don’t break any law. I like to think the police would be present enough to stop a man from assaulting someone in broad daylight on main street, for instance; that doesn’t mean I think police should follow you every time you go outdoors to arrest you if you ever spit on the sidewalk, or commit jaywalking.

I believe police can exist, and stop some crimes from occurring, without totally overruling free will.

I believe any god could allow a world to exist without overruling free will and yet still provide some check to the worst excesses. Why not give a child miraculous powers to stop an attacker? The priest or whoever begins to rape the child, and the child cries out, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” and just like that the attacker is struck blind or lame or knocked unconscious so the child can escape. Or the child is starving to death, but when he prays God sends mana from heaven to help him.

You are parroting an excuse for evil given to you by your preachers and teachers, but if you think about it using your own common sense you will see the excuse in inadequate.

You are wrong. He made a perfectly valid point, if a bit overstated. What would human life be like if God took away all human pain and suffering? We would be little better than pampered pets raised in a zoo, our every need taken care of, all painful experiences taken away by the supposedly “kind” God. What parent removes all suffering from their children’s lives? Atheist make this goofy leap that the only good God is one that would take away human misery, because God could do such a thing. This is a child’s conception of God, and of human experience.

Hi The_Physeter, my understanding of your comment is a question about why God doesn’t make miracles happen, is that correct? If that’s the question, then I would politely suggest that that’s the difficulty in making generalisations and assumptions about child rape, starvation, etc; namely, other people’s suffering. Unless you know the specific circumstances for a person who’s experienced those things, how can we say whether God’s intervened or not?

I find his argument naive in that he equates all gods in history with the Judeo-Christian God who spoke against child sacrifice. He infers that all religions practised child sacrifice and placing children in the foundations of buildings for protection.

Unfortunately, as a disciple of Christ, I agree with his point about the narcissism of Western Christianity.

I do not subscribe to his view that the highest entity is human life and his argument strongly relies on “the sanctity of human life” and especially the precious nature of children. Under an evolutionary, scientific view the highest form of life is the human but my view is that God is even higher and incomprehensible to us as temporal beings, limited in time and space. I do not know how I can fully comprehend the God that I consider to be transcendent.

Phil, thanks for your feedback. I’d like to ask if the god you believe in ever does anything to manifest itself in reality? If it does, what has been done by this god which we can all know for sure it was done by a god? If it doesn’t, then from our perspective, how is a real god which doesn’t manifest in reality any different from no god at all?

Hi Pierre, I apologise for not responding to your polite questions. I have been off-line with other more pressing matters.
I am not sure if I can answer your question in a way that will satisfy you. Unfortunately I see that either scientific evolution, or belief in God (god), both have a large element of faith. Neither can be proven, both require adherents to believe in aspects that have not been witnessed or proven.
My experience is a God who manifested in his creation, the sun, moon, planets, earth, animals, plants fish and birds. I cannot prove his existence to you. For me it is belief.
I don’t think I will be able to persuade you, I don’t think I will try.
I will inform you that my belief comes from partially from similar understandings to CS Lewis and Chuck Colson. CS Lewis was an intellectual sceptic who describes himself as a “reluctant convert” when he realised, logically, that the historical figure that is referred to as Jesus Christ could only be a lunatic or the Lord.
Chuck Colson, who was imprisoned for his role in the Watergate Scandal under President Richard Nixon marvelled that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ must be fact. There is no reason that 12 men would die for a lie.

Unfortunately, all gods tend to be supported by the same kinds of weak evidence as the Christian god. Unless there is some way to really quantify this god in a realistic way, his existence will be questionable. You cannot say at the same time that you know this god and then say he is incomprehensible.

Matthew 13:14-15
“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’

Maybe, a very weak argument, is that I know Donald Trump. there is plenty of evidence that he exists. I am unlikely to ever meet him, and as an Australian, the US President is mostly an abstract concept to me but still nonetheless very real.
Many people are moving away from empiricism, only that which can be perceived can be proven. Modernity relies on empiricism, but post modern thinking questions truth. Under the new paradigm supernatural and incomprehensible phenomena are welcomed as fascinating. I find the same with spiritual matters. I have experience that I can only describe as intimate, comforting and real but as I move closer and attempt to define these experiences I have no explanation. My faith journey is happy to attribute these experiences to a loving, creator God.

To choose not to stop or prevent “evil” is not by definition “malevolent”. Rather God Himself says that He uses the evil, which is in the world because of man, to serve His holy purpose. Is there a holy purpose or any good result from child rape etc…no, but neither does Gid cause this to happen but brings comfort in the midst of it. As any good parent, God does not stop us from failing or seek to remove the consequences of our actions, rather He loves us through them that we may learn from both good and bad

I didn’t say or even imply he caused the event (although it could be argued that if he created the system and new what the result would,be, then he ultimately caused it). What Imsaid wasmthat if you seemamchild being raped and do nothing even though you have the power tomstop the rape, you are immoral in that instance. Are you saying that there is a moral justification for child rape?

If you were a parent, would you allow your child to rape another child for the purpose of some greater good?

Atheists, because of their self imposed limitations, seem to have this child’s idea of God as just someone whose job it is to make sure that nothing bad ever happens to anyone. This is not any modern religion’s idea of God, so why do you use it? You seem to want to dictate to religions what a proper conception of God must be, according to your limited understanding of God. This is like an average person telling a physicist that his conception of how gravity works MUST be wrong, because gravity SHOULD work this way. Often, things do not work the way we INITIALLY think they should. Once we have a fuller understanding of how everyting fits together, things that we initially thought looked “immoral” can turn out to be moral after all. The atheist says “Well if I were a Godk then I would keep all child rapes from happeningbecause I am a good guy”. This is like an uninformed person saying to a Doctor “How dare you cut off that man’s leg! That is immoral! He needs to walk! And then later on the guy dies because of gangrene. Usually atheists are full of seeming good debate points, but no real deep understanding of human life.

God Himself says that He uses the evil, which is in the world because of man, to serve His holy purpose.

and

Is there a holy purpose or any good result from child rape etc…no

you are contradicting yourself in the most basic way. There is no ‘good’ that a child learns from being raped. There is no ‘good’ that a child learns from starving to death. The “good parent” doesn’t stand back and watch a child starve to death, especially when the child did not choose to starve to death.

Your mistaken idea that God is just a parent, a being there to watch over you and make sure you don’t fall when riding your bike for the first time, is a childish idea of God. I find that atheists, despite their claims to superior reason, usually have this child’s idea of God. Why this is so, I don’t know.

Simple, we got our ideas of God from Christians, nobody else. This is the God Christians convey, one who finds them parking places and saves one person from a plane crash which He did not prevent. And is simultanously all-powerful and all loving and all knowing. In short, an impossible being.

Michael, do you believe God can do anything? If so, he could accomplish his holy purpose regardless of whether or not the child gets brutally raped. Or perhaps you could explain how preventing a rapist from brutally raping a child causes God to lose some of his power.

“When I was a child, I thought as a child… ‘ This is what your comments remind me of. You conceive of God as Malevolent, because he does not do what you think he should do. Yet you do not know everything. You do not know what effects one action has on anther. You purposely have to limit your isnpection to what happens to individuals here on earht, with no ability to see what effect this even has on other people’s lives on earth here in time. You arrogantly think this way because you do not know what the total effect of any one action might be. Free will does come into play in any situation in which man is an actor. Children dying due to lack of food is something that people can control. They choose not to, because they engage in war, or implement communism, or do any of the things that cause famines. So many having free will, will experience the effects of using that free will incorrectly. The only place your idea holds up is the case of tsunamis, etc. Your assumption is that there is no afterlife (an unproven assumption) and that the only thing that matters is what happens to people on earth. As I said before, if we take religion on its own basis, then those who die in a tsunami probably go to heaven,at least the vast bulk, and their situation is improved. So at least the claims of Christianity make logical sense, at least taken on their own terms. So your point that God MUST BE immoral because he allows a tsunami is provably false.

The same as why he didn’t prevent Jesus from being crucified, or Jerusalem from being destroyed by the Romans, or millions being killed by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. We live in a fallen world, ruled by Satan and hatred. But we can personally choose another path. Unfortunately, few make that choice.

So you are saying you believe it is moral for a being that has the power to stop suffering to not act and end it? You actually believe it is moral for your god to stand by while amchild is raped a d watch it rather than stop it?

And what is that reason? The reason God doesn’t prevent ISIS terrorists from killing innocent civilians? Is he not capable? Does he not know about the killings? Does he not care enough to do anything about it?

Didn’t prevent Jesus from being crucified? I thought you Christians believed that it was HIs idea! And also that he WAS Jesus. And also that Jesus being crucified was a GOOD thing (as in Good Friday). It’s hard to follow you people sometimes.

God didn’t want that to happen, but He knew it would. He obviously could have prevented it. Jesus prayed for Him to “remove this cup.” It demonstrated for all to see how corrupt mankind has become but it also demonstrated for all to see the depth of God’s love and forgiveness.

BTW, speaking of “you people” — I thought “you people” usually accused the Father of child abuse for sacrificing the Son. You, too, are hard to follow.

So you have TWO all powerful deities in your universe. “There was no such in Eden” Oh really? (I mean, really, in the imaginary world in which there actually was a Garden of Eden) But wasn’t the Snake an embodiment of Satan, and wasn’t the Snake in the Garden? I do wish you peope would keep your story straight.

No one chooses to be a child rapist. That is just what they are by birth and they can’t help it. One day, the hateful and bigoted will finally recognize this truth for what it is, the child rape is normal. One day, child rapist will also proudly be able to stand under the rainbow flag. As for starving children, tsunamis and earthquakes, we should be thankful that these natural forces help keep the world from be over populated. It saves the abortion clinics a lot of work.

You cannot believe that there is no God and yet blame him for the world’s problems. In fact, if there is no God, then there cannot be good or evil. Consequently, there is no moral component to any of the things that you have described as “evil”. To even acknowledge such a thing is to acknowledge a good, a God.

I never mentioned whether someone chooses to be a child rapist. it is utterly beside the point I was making.

You do not need a supernatural being to decide what is good and what is evil.

I am not blaming him for anything. I am pointing out the consequences of religious reasoning. Other people say he exists. Other people say he allows this sort of thing for some greater good. I am pointing out that it is still immoral. Morals are subjective and not objective, at least not in that sense. We make our own moral codes.

it is pretty nonsensical to claim it is Immoral to allow a tsunami to happen, because some atheist somewhere thinks it is not the thing to do. Assuming that all these people go to heaven, then it is in fact promoting them, and improving their condition. You might as well say the doctor is a bad man for making you take that awful tasting medicine. If you are going to argue about God, then take him on his own terms, don’t alter the facts.

Wouldn’t it be a very strange coincidence if all those people go to Heaven, especially when only a small proportion are Christian? If you say they go to Heaven because of their works, why believe? In what sense is a tsunami medicine, and why were only the people on the coasts surrounding an earthquake blessed with it? If you think they go to Heaven because of their faiith, then God sent some of them to Hell who would otherwise lived and converted.

” If you are going to argue about God, then take him on his own terms, don’t alter the facts.” I love that. The facts being what your version of Christianity says they are, right?

Blaming God for the evil acts of evil men exhibits a juvenile and childish way of thinking about God and His ways. God would have to destroy all mankind to stop all evil because we all have at one time or another commited some kind of evil act or thought that violates God’s perfect standards.

Didn’t say the people who were committing immoral acts were not responsible.
Merele pointed out that the Christian god is presented as omnipotent and omnibenevolent which means he should have both the power and the will to prevent such things. He does not. Therefore he is either not omnipotent, not omnibenevolent, or he is malevolent. It really is that simple

You sir claim to know the unfathomable depths of God’s mind, His abilities (or inabilities), etc. I challenge you now to explore the unfathomable depths of evil. Start first by gazing into the mirror and the deep crevaces within your soul.

God has intervened many times in human history. Evil became so bad He sent a flood to destroy every living breathing human being, except Noah and his family.

For every one “child rape” He has probably stopped or prevented thousands of others rapes. For every psunami He has probably stopped one hundred others.

Nope. Just using reason based upon what Christians tell me their god is. Don’t care if he prevented a million child rapes. if one occurred, then he is still immoral for allowing it in that instance.
And by the way, feel free to provide the evidence supporting the claim he prevented any rapes at all.

” Evil became so bad He sent a flood to destroy every living breathing human being, except Noah and his family.”
You’re saying that every living breathing human being except Noah and his family were irredeemably evil? Even the children?

(Fortunately, the Flood is fiction.)

Why didn’t he send them a Saviour, the way you say he did the next time around? They’re two rather dramatically different solutions to the same problem.

That’s right. Where ever does it say that God should prevent any harm from coming to people? Usually this sort of comment comes from someone with a very shallow concept of God as some sort of Santa Claus, or Giant Mommy that must protect us all the time. No religion takes that approach to God. They have a more grown up vision of God.

I don’t know if that is spelled out specifically in those words anywhere. But if you posit an all-loving, all-powerful & all-knowing god, you better be sure that the type of catastrophes Milton describes aren’t occurring. Why? Because if they do occur, we can use simple logic to show that your god doesn’t exist.

Samton, you are completely missing the point. I asked a question which has a yes or no answer and nobody seems to want to answer it.
The question was if you have the power to stop a child from being raped without any risk to yourself whatsoever and you choose to do nothing, is your decision moral or Immoral???

Is not the Christian god desctibed by Christians as omnibenevolent?

If you think it would be moral, then I would deem you immoral by my stsndards. If you deem it immoral, then your god is immoral for doing just this.

Would you care to answer the question instead of trying to characterize someone you know nothing about?

“Where ever does it say that God should prevent any harm from coming to people?” Where it says that God is 100% loving AND omnipotent. If you’d stopped with one or the other, you might have had something, but oh no, you had to make him all-loving AND all-knowing AND all-powerful, and that combination is not consistent with non-human-caused evil on earth.

The entire theology of the creation of man, free will, man’s fall and Jesus’ redemption is far beyond what I can write in this word-limited post. May I respectfully suggest you do like Sarah: investigate Christianity with an open mind.

Every Catholic parish that I know begins a course in Christianity and Catholicism (in that order) in September. Find one near you and learn the answers to these valid questions.

What makes you the person that gets to interpret for everyone else? That is my point. A message from a god should not need interpretation. It should not be open to human interpretation at all it should be clear and direct and understood the same way by everyone. The Quran is the work of humans, just like all books, including the Bible.

I believe that’s true, Milton, but I also believe that my God is the God of the universe. He reveals Himself in whatever ways He chooses. Throughout history, this has been through the person of Jesus, His creation (the universe and everything in it, including other people), dreams, conscience/ the Holy Spirit and in other ways that I don’t know.

Matthew 7:7-8 “Ask and it will be given to you;seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” Thanks for the question, Pierre. God reveals Himself to me everyday in the most wonderful ways. The Holy Spirit and what I know of God from His Word tell me it is Him, the one true God.

Hi Pierre, I’m happy to go into detail but I’m not sure how useful this is? As Milton points out, how I think God has revealed Himself to me is of little value to anyone but me. At the end of the day, you either believe Jesus was the Son of God or you don’t, nothing I can write will change that.

Thanks for really wanting to know about how God speaks to me, Pierre! Every day I listen to the Bible while I work and my nearly 2-year-old son has his day-time nap. Today, God revealed to me who the “fool” is in the book of Proverbs. It’s not someone lacking intelligence but someone who rebels against God, “the mocker… the foolish… the wicked… the faithless.” You can verify that this was the passage I read today, 5th June, by going to: https://www.bibleinoneyear.org/bioy/commentary/2560.

As for whether this revelation is from God, it’s written in His Word but there are also other passages that might be relevant, such as:
Matthew 7:16 “By their fruits you will know them. Do you gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?”
and
Matthew 16:1-4:
“The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven. 2 He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ 3 and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. 4 A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Jesus then left them and went away.”

I hope this answers your question. I am praying that God would reveal Himself to you today, Pierre.

Annie – Thanks for sharing that. You have not shown how you know that the revelation comes from God, but have shown why you believe the revelation came from God. I want to know how you know the revelation actually comes from a god.

Hi Pierre, I’m happy to go into detail but I’m not sure how useful this is? As Milton pointed out, how I think God has revealed Himself to me is of little value to anyone but me. At the end of the day, you either believe Jesus was the Son of God or you don’t, nothing I can write will change that.

You are contradicting yourself if you say he needs no interpretation and then agree he does in the Bible. If you are saying he competely reveals himself in ways other than than the Bible, then you have made that collection of stories of little value. Besides, how you think he has revealed himself to you is of little value to anyone but you. How would anyone else evaluate the truthfulness of such a claim against all the other religions that claim the same sort of evidence for their god as well?

Hi Milton, thanks for your well thought-out comments and questions. To me, it’s not a contradiction because I believe the Holy Spirit is our interpreter, guiding us in understanding God, His creation and His Word. That’s true, how I think He revealed Himself to me is of little value to anyone but me. It does demonstrate, however, some of the ways that God reveals Himself to some people. I’m not sure about the gods of other religions but my God says, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.” (Isaiah 45:5)

Annie,
To me, if messages from a god require interpretation, there is no way to know who is correctly interpreting the intent. This is very ibvious from the fact that there are tens of thousands of kinds of Christians.

But let’s try your interpretation.

Why does god think it is a moral action for him to allow child rape?

Why does god think there are circumstances that make owning other people a moral act?

Hi Milton, I’m sorry, I think you misunderstood my point, I was saying that revelation from God does not require interpretation because we (Christians) have the Holy Spirit within us. I would also disagree that there are “tens of thousands of kinds of Christians.” Christian believers may place different emphasis of different parts of the Bible but the fact that you can call us ‘Christians’ demonstrates that we all believe that Jesus Christ lived, was crucified and rose again from the dead.

Regarding your questions, is it specifically child rape that you would like to know about or human suffering in general? And by “child rape” are you referring to a particular event or events? What do you mean by “owning” and how does this relate to morality? Thank you again for your questions and comments.

It doesn’t matter whether he appears in a burning bush or as a voice in a dream or hardening our hearts, he’s still intervening, interfering in the course of events that you say will end in our judgement for what WE do.

It could be argued, but I don’t think it would be a stable argument. One can then point at all the others the turn to different religions for similar reasons, leaving them in those beliefs when they die, separating them from God forever. You can’t just take the affirming cases and say therefore God, but ignore all other cases that don’t yield the same result. It turns into mental gymnastics of giving credit to God and saying we could never really understand when giving him credit for other things doesn’t make sense.

I definitely see your point. However it seems that the appeal of values was only the thing that first opened her eyes to the relevance of faith. In this article she also describes discovering Christianities intellectual appeal, the need for integrity and coherence in world-view and seeing people walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

To put it another way, read how she describes her conversion and ask yourself how much of that can be explained by the comfort of appealing ideas:

“One Sunday, […] I walked into a church for the first time as someone earnestly seeking God. Before long I found myself overwhelmed. At last I was fully known and seen and, I realised, unconditionally loved – perhaps I had a sense of relief from no longer running from God. […] one night, after a couple months of attending church, I knelt in my closet in my apartment and asked Jesus to save me, and to become the Lord of my life.”

If the appealing ideas were all that mattered to her, why would she ask for someone to save her and be the Lord of her life? I see your point, but she obviously had a long, facéted and personal journey before she fully laid her life in his hands.

Surely the “as someone earnestly seeking God” rings alarm bells? Here we have someone who is not fulfilled in her “purpose in life” or who experiences some emptiness of some kind, and she is looking for something. So she goes to church… Whammo! Found God! If she had ventured to Tibet in her search, I suggest Sarah would have found a different god. Of course she will find something that makes her feel better. Unfortunately that doesn’t make it true. In my view, what’s real matters more than what makes me feel good. As a historian, Sarah should have examined the veracity of the Bible and its path to us before taking the leap of faith.

I’m not sure I understand. How do you know that if she went to Tibet she would have found a different god? What god would she have found? You also make the claim that Sarah should have examined the truth of the bible. However, Sarah said “From there, I started a rigorous diet of theology, reading the Bible and
exploring theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and F.D.
Maurice.” and this would include that exploration of real truth as this would address that concept of the “veracity of the bible”.

So, I’m not sure what point you are really making. Maybe you can elaborate to make your point clearer because it seems that you just don’t feel good about the words she used to tell her story and you aren’t concerned with the truth of her story.

Maurice, Tillich, Niebuhr, and Ramsey are hardly “apologetics” in the sense of fundamentalists trying to “prove” the Bible. They were some of the most brilliant theologians of the 19th and 20th century, AND voices of the progressive politics and social reforms of their time.

David, I didn’t say her story wasn’t true, I’m sure she’s a Christian now, and that her path to it was as she said. My point was that she claims she did not enter Sydney University with a need for faith to ground her identity or values, and yet it is clear that she did. However, while “exploring theologians” is a way to get more knowledge about the bible, I could argue that she didn’t explore the Islamic or Jewish scholars who have other things to say about their own texts which equally claim truth about God. By veracity of the Bible, I mean a study of its origins, documentary analysis, internal consistencies (or rather contradictions!), historical verification (Creation, Noah’s Flood, Tower of Babel, the exodus from Egypt, Jesus’ birth, resurrection and ascension, Second Coming, etc), internal ethical inconsistencies (homosexuality, marriage, role of women, use of violence, importance of family, role of the Law, …), authorship (who actually wrote the “Books of Moses”, or the Proverbs – all from Solomon?, or Hebrews – probably not Paul), compilation of the Biblical Canon by church councils hundreds of years after Jesus’ death, just for starters. Maybe she worked through all that and more to convince herself that the Bible can be trusted as God’s infallible Word, and then maybe not?

Jeff Have you considered that there is only One God who answers and as Sarah has found that God is doing something in the world today. Peopel often ask if there is a God what is he doing about this? People changing from Islam have been astounded by the fact that God asnwers prayer. He has not changed He loved Adam and Eve and He continues to love mankind today. We hate things which go wrong or when people take the wrong path – what are they like to the Creator the One whose they are. Suicide bombers – they are not instructed by God to do what they do, it is all about them. The guy who shot John Lennon had a crazed thought that God was telling him to do that. Not the God I know. Read the New testament to the Bible to get to know the God of the Universe and Jesus Christ whom He sent. Jesus showed us exactly who He is. Jesus Christ has God given authority over all flesh whether they agree to it or not. In the worldy sense and with Corporate games it is a leap of faith. The way of the world is enmity to God. The gift of Faith, yes it is a gift not a leap but a gift is from God and comes when we earnestly seek Him. Earnestly seek. Examining the veracity of the Bible! Man it has been investigated by some very learned scholars much greater than you or I. Examining is not seeking however with your mind you may examine and with your heart, the deep seated heart of acknowledgement may you seek and find. Faith, Hope and Love. Christians have these three because they trust the truth the absolute truth. Yes atheism makes a mockery of God, as much as they say there is not a God, they then paint a picture of a delusion of God. How can they say who or what God is when they do not know Him. No man can say that he fully comprehends our eternal Creator. He is beyond our comprehension. However the true Christian knows God and has a living experience of God’s power in their life a guarantee of their future with Him. The first step is acknowledging our short comings and looking to His greatness and reasing what He has done for us.

Gemmel, I’ve actually considered all you state. In response, I can just say that you have jumped to misconceptions about my own path from faith to reality. Atheists don’t “mock” God, although it seems that way to religious people. How can I mock a god I don’t think exists? It’s like mocking Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. My “living experience” of God as a Christian for over 30 years, who put my whole trust in him, and who earnestly searched for the truth so that I could confidently proclaim Jesus as a pastor, is that God constantly proves he is not there or he doesn’t care. I sincerely wish the tale was true, but the Bible demonstrates its own weakness as a revelation of God through the many hundreds (thousands?) of different interpretations and the lack of unity in the church. In John 17:21 Jesus prays that his followers would be united so that the world could see that God sent him. Well, that prayer was just as powerful as all prayers are! The conclusion we can draw from that text alone is that Jesus was not sent by God, the evidence is all around us.

Jeff, Firsly people whether they believe in God or not mock God with their sin. Refusing to admit what yo udo is mocking is a problem in itself. Just becasue yo usay there is “no god” does not mean gods do not exist. In fact many make gods out of themselves. For me a believer, a sinner but redeemed. The most amazing is Grace with all the different personal and unique interpreatation that God in His grace holds it all together. The Bible tells us Jesus mantioned that every hair on our head is numbered. Recorded by both Luke and Matthew.

Psalm 139:17-18 How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
1 Kings 4:29
Now God gave Solomon wisdom and very great discernment and breadth of mind, like the sand that is on the seashore.
These verses possibly are wasted on you however they go to exalt God’s knowledge and power and what He is capable of. Having a wrong and small view of God is many people’s issue. This verse speaks of the origin of the wisdom of a King who is renowned for His wisdom.. God given not man bulit.

One thing I will ask you to discern before your reply is What is mockery? It falls alongside very much the definition of sin! That whcich we should do and the failure to do that which we should. Take care! The second thing is what separates people from God and why is it that some say He is and I expereince Him and others do not. Perhaps as a Christian there may have been some house cleaning required. Investigate on your tube what it is to clean your house. This from a sinner who struggles with His walk with God but knows God is more than enough for me and look forward to nearer and closer relationship with Him. What might oit take to have a close and intimate relationship in a relationship, outsdie of the phyical intimacy. YES Jesus is alive and yo ucan have this intimate relationship with him and YES He was sent, YES He was crucified and His body buried for 3 days; The cross and the tomb could not hold Him and YES you can see Him today – take a look at what you are looking for in Revelation 1 to get the right view so as not to be entrenched i nthe past. Romans 12:1-2. Psalm 1

Sorry but constant use of the bible to prove the bible is in itself evidence that you have no real argument. You obviously didn’t read what I wrote. I studied theology to be a pastor. I loved and believed the whole thing. Nothing you have said is new to me. After a long and very hard road of unlearning misinformation and searching for reality I am angry that so much of my life was wasted on religious nonsense. That’s why I am angry at religious indoctrination of the young and why your long, painful and uneducated response makes me literally sick to the stomach.

You can study theology and have all the degrees under the sun, it is all meaningless unless there is one thing involved. Without faith it is impossible to know God…Hebrews 11:6. The evidence is the Bible and the personal and unique journey of every Christian the testimony.

What sin or event occurred that separated you from God or at least resulted in denial? Check out the history of the hymn ” It is well with my soul” by Horatio Spafford.

Read John 6 and understand completely the different reactions of people to Jesus statement of which none understood. See the beginnings of simple faith there. What might this look like in the full hebrew translation?
Children need to hear and we need to have a response like a little child.
“God is real and I want to get to know Him”(Ash 6)

That is a very haughty assertion to make about someone who spent over 5 years studying Christian theology, philosophy, and history. How do you know the depths of what she evaluated in that time? Obviously in this article that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t writing a thesis on the merits for the various arguments of God’s existence. She was giving a personal testimony to the grace of Christ in her life. I’m sure she would be more than happy to discuss the details of her intellectual journey on the topic if you would RESPECTFULLY contact and inquire with her. She may even have some sources to recommend which you may find helpful.

The link to her faculty profile is at the very bottom, in the details about the author, where you would expect to find such things. On the page is a contact tab, which includes her email address and phone number.

I commend you for doing so. Keep in mind the time difference between here and Australia, and the fact that university faculty inboxes tend to be overloaded with email. If she does not respond to you within a few days, I would recommend resending it around 10AM (UTC+10:00, Australian Eastern Time). You can also try calling her by phone and leaving a message. That will more likely produce a prompt response.

CD, I have to give you kudos (what the heck are kudos, anyway?LOL) Most often when i get into a discussion with a theist, it eventually breaks down into either ad hominems or falling back on “it’s just faith”.

I am glad to inform you that there Christians who are rational and thoughtful without expense to compassion and decorum. I appreciate your kind words, and likewise am pleased that you also have maintained a standard of discussion.

Yeah, I spent six weeks in Sydney while working for a former employer. The time difference was bizarre. Not just time of day, but a change of day (across the international dateline). So it was possible for one person to receive a fax a day before it was sent. Mind bending.

I am interested in what is actually true. Do you think she can demonstrate that the Christian god actually exists? If so, she has succeeded where thousands of years of apologetics have failed. She has not succeeded in doing so within her article.

Again, it is readily apparent that her article is not intended to be a piece on apologetics, nor did it ever claim to be. It is a personal testimony. And what I think about what she is capable of is irrelevant. You are welcome to contact her and ask, or not–that is your choice.

You use the word true, but how do you define that? What evidence is necessary to propel your interpretation from disbelief to belief on a truth claim? Me personally, I have found the cumulative evidence to be overwhelmingly convincing in favor of the Gospel. So, whereas those two-thousand years of Christian apologetics have presently failed for you, they have not for me–or the author, for that matter. Or probably half of the 2.2 billion Christians in the world. You are welcome to structinize to your hearts’ content, and even rationalize away rationality while you are at it, but at the end of the day you are just a juror–not a jury. Whether you accept or reject the Gospel is completely irrelevant to the whole.

It is my prayer that folks like you do come to receive it, because it will completely change your life and bring you the joy that so unequivocally eludes you. However, at the same time the belief of others is not contingent upon your own. None of us owe you an explanation you deem acceptable in order to validate our trust in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Just keep that in mind when you engage in these discussions. All doubts will find their end in eternity. The question worth asking is whether doubt justifies disengaging from trust.

I did emailed her at your suggestion, CD. You used the word “true” in your previous response. I will leave the definition to you for now.

I can say that all claims are not equal and so all claims do not require the same level of evidence. The claims of a supernatural being are very extraordinary, and therefore call for an extraordinary level of evidence.

Let me give you an example:

If you came to me and simply stated that you had a car in your garage, I would take you at your word. Why? Because i know from personal experience and the experience of millions of others that garages actually exist, and people tend to park cars in them.

But what if you came to me and claimed you had an invisible dragon in your garage? Should i take your word, or should i demand a great deal of hard evidence? I know that nobody has ever produced a single dragon, let alone a fire breathing one. There is nothing on which I might base my belief.

Your argument is not uncommon, but the claim to extraordinary evidence has been strongly refuted by many philosophers, both theists and nontheists (atheist and agnostic). Two notable ones are Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, though the Mathematician John Lennox has also touched on this a bit I think. Here is a well-written article that summarizes some of the problems with the assertion you are making:

(#3 deals with the extraordinary evidence issue specifically)
One of the biggest problems which I find is the implicit positivism that tends to pervade this line of objection. I hope you find the article helpful.

Error #1: The burden of proof falls with theists, and not with atheists.

My response:

The burden of proof always lies with the one making the positive claim. most atheists do not claim there is no god, but rather say they do not feel the evidence supports the claim. I am one of those, and we are in the majority. Yes, I also do not think one actually does, but I am open to sufficient evidence should it every be presented. But the fact that after thousands of years, the proof has not materialized, i do not see that as probable. But I never argue that position because i do not have absolute knowledge. So, in my case, this is erroneous. I do not claim that I know that none exist. Only that i do not believe any exist. For your benefit, remember that distinction in future discussions with atheists. don’t lump them all into one pile.
There is “hard atheism”, which does claim there is no god, and i would agree that this view does carry a burden of proof. So do as i do with theists. The first thing to do is to ask “what do you believe and why do you believe it?”

The claim that there is a god, or that people rose from the grave, are non-falsifiable within scientific protocol. There is no way to scientifically explore these claims. The supernatural, if it exists is outside the realm of scientific exploration because science is the systematic exploration of the natural.. Therefore it is by definition unfalsifiable. What tests would you devise that demonstrate in a repeatable manner that a deity creates things?
i do believe that religious concepts should not get a free ride and not be subject to the same scrutiny as any other idea. If the idea is true, then it will withstand the scrutiny.

This is undeniably true. I gave an example in an earlier post. When you postulate the existence of something that is completely outside all natural experience and claim attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. and say it is invisible and undetectable and immeasurable, and exists outside space and time, you burden of proof becomes very heavy indeed. The example about the murder scene is in no way comparable.

Error #4: Religious claims should be held to a higher burden of proof than other claims.

My response:

Nobody has ever claimed this as far as I know. It is a straw-man argument.
Religious claims should be held to the exact same scientifically rigorous standards of proof as anything else of this magnitude. They unfortunately cannot be examined in this manner because the tend to be unfalsifiable.

I think this is the danger of having young believers write articles regarding these subjects. They are true infants in their life in Christ and therefore sometimes speak in shallow ways. In time, if she’s truly born again, the Holy Spirit will bring her along making her mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Yea man I agree 100%. That what I was kinda saying at the end of my comment, I just thought it important for people to be skeptical of what initiates their journey towards faith. Believing something for the wrong reason I think can often be just as bad as not believing it at all. It’s great that she has the personal experience of being overwhelm, but I personally just see humans as vulnerable to such feelings at various times in our lives when we have questions. And those same sorts of feels are what lead so many others to other various incompatible religions.

I think Christianity deserves a thorough look into the truth of the claims made in its doctrines and then and only ends should one believe, or believe for an intellectually stable reason, I think.

But again, just my views on true faith, I know this is not how the majority of the world comes to theirs!

I don’t read her becoming a Christian for “ideas”, but rather because she became acquainted with how Christianity made sense existentially. She became aware of an absurdity that was only rectified by turning to the Christian view of reality. Maybe not exactly Kierkegaardian, but perhaps not too dissimilar.

I see what you’re saying, but existentialism is majorly defined by ideas, it’s beyond tactile things that we can experience, so I’m not clearly seeing the distinction you’re trying to make. If you can elaborate that might help me? To me, Christianity is about belief in Jesus and his resurrection as our salvation. This and this alone is what defines a Christian, and the way one acts etc is just what automatically comes with it. Here, Sarah seemed to just think that the Christian way of life has more ‘Darwinian utility’, which as an Atheist, I agree with. But this should not be filled in by “therefore Christianity is true.”

Nah not at all, just bummed out by the confirmation bias people succumb to when deciding their beliefs on major issues in the world based on what ‘feels’ best to them. Did my enlightening comment make you feel nervous and probe your counter comment?

I don’t believe that people are inclined to reveal their true motivations to the public. I feel that even at the youngest ages, perception is reality. What we see around us is reality and can be depended on to be true. Part of that reality is our ability to perceive and analyze incoming information. Just as the existence of a car suggests a creator, the existence of people and the universe suggests a creator. Everyone is entitled to come to their own conclusions. Free speech enables opposing views to be made public, allowing decisions to be made with available wisdom.

No, what you perceive at any age is perception, and reality is the truth. This type of relativistic thinking is what’s wrong with the Left. As for your argument about designers, I urge you to read a few books about intelligent design and evolution, the myth that something seeming a certain way to our human minds makes it true is a complete fallacy!

Correct me if I am wrong, but you are saying that reality as defined by you is truth. That seems to be very relativistic . Since we don’t see eye to eye on intelligent design, you are suggesting that I read books that will convince me of your way of thinking. Try looking again at my statements minus any semantics.

Where did I say I defined reality? Just because believe that my perception align with the truth, does not in any way imply that I am defining the truth. That’s an important distinction to be able to make.

I urge you to read the book about arguments from design, or even some YouTube videos might suffice, because this is one of the weakest and most often debunked arguments for theism. Very few intellectual thinkers see grounds for that line of thought, though I admit, on the surface level I understand why one would perceive it to be the case, as I once did myself.

In looking at your comments, I still see it as a massive problem to say perception is reality. That means there can be multiple realities and this by the laws of logic does not hold true. People need to be willing to entertain the thought that we as humans can be easily deceived, which I for one see religion to have done on a massive scale.

The perception of reality varies with each individual. A persons point of view influences their perception. I will assume that when you say, “what we perceive”, you are using “we” in a collective sense. Therefore, you and others of a like mind perceive the earth to be flat therefore, it must be flat.Science is not a democratic institution. Unanimous agreement does not denote accuracy or truth. The examination of the earth and its physical properties led to the proposition that the earth is a sphere. After numerous observations, similar conclusions were arrived at. No one can see the wind, but it is possible to see the evidence of its existence. You may take the position that wind doesn’t exist because you cannot see it. Does that belief make the wind nonexistent ? Man has been given the gift of independent thought. He is able to consider what he perceives and and from that draw conclusions. He may conclude that there is no God. For that man there is no God and his life will not have the aid of God and will end when he dies. Another may conclude that God is real. For that man God does exist and will be an influence in his life and will dire3ct where his soul goes when his physical body dies.We are allowed the right to choose and rightly will endure the consequences of our choices.The assumptions in life that we can make are limited. Using false assumptions leads to false conclusions.

Hey Dan? Did you Peter Singer is OK with slaughtering disabled newborns and that he values pigs over newborn humans? Did you know that other people who have valued animals above humans include Adam Lanza and Hitler?

Yes, Singer is a bad role model, but there are many warm-hearted humanists who would disagree with him. I also suspect from your emotive language that your paraphrase of his views is not 100% accurate.

Hugh7 “your emotive language”… so you decide on the truth of things based upon the sentence structure or choice of words used. Very scientific.
Can I suggest that you read Singer’s own articles and also those of his detractors – to get a balanced view and make up your own mind. What Jangmi has said of Singer is correct, in fact Singer is outspoken on the relative worthlessness and discardablity of humanity. He, *like many atheists* are acting true to their belief system – at least he is consistent. Are you?

God’s creation, in itself, determines an intrinsic worth, apart from Him then declaring the relative worth and position of His creation (humans, animals, insects and plant life) in the first book, the book of Genesis. He built it all for us. He elsewhere also states the worth and position of his other creations that being heavenly beings such as angel. As followers of God we respect you and all other life according to those declarations, because we understand the value that has been placed upon creation by God himself. Humans (in God’s own words) are the pinnacle of His creation, intended for His glory and companionship, so much so that He subjugated His spiritual form for mortal form to live among us, to bear the weight of sin and offer Himself as sacrifice for all who would accept Him. It was not a impulsive act, nor a casual act, but one of total commitment to Love for His creation – that is how much we are worth to Him. Even if it weren’t true and heaven (life with God forevermore) is a fallacy, I would rather live believing that someone loves me enough no matter how awful I am, to suffer and give up His own life for me, to provide a way in which I can commune with Him (prayer, Holy Spirit) than to embrace a philosophy that denies any intrinsic worth other than my constituent physical parts and teaches aloneness in a world of death and purposelessness.

Wow mate, sorry just seeing this now. While on the topic of pointing out single individual’s views, straw manning them, and making a caricature of all those with an atheistic belief system, allow me to point out a few Christians who…oh wait, yea this is a stupid and irrelevant approach to having an actual conversation about a big issue. You do you buddy, keep giving the regressive left examples of the idiotic conservatives the paint the rest of us as.

If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to the strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.
— Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (Chapter 2, Aristotle and Greek Science, Part 3, The Foundation of Logic).

“To know what a Christian means by God” – Know God through just the Bible. Jesus showed the way. Why would you go to Aquinas when God’s word is God’s word? That does not make sense. It is like drinking for a muddied puddle. Psalm 1

There is a god of this world his name is satan and he is the father of all who deceive, manipulate, murder,lie….the list could go on becasue SIN is endless. How might satan be defeated? The answer is He was at the cross. When people accept Jesus there is nothing satan can do to loose that person from God’s hand or prise him from God’s kingdom. You see you want to ask what God is doing and look for what God is doing rather than what evil is doing in this world. Certianly muslims need to consider Jesus whilst they have a roadblock of only considering Him as a prophet, this is like just considering one grain of sand of his character. Jesus challeneged wrong ideas even from one of His most devoted followers..saying ” Get behind me satan…. you do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men”.Matt 16:23 SIN has HUGE implications for innocent victims. Stop and ponder that for a while. What is the impact of one person’s sin on others? What does it truly mean to love God and others? How much is God concerned about relationship?

The errors, once seen, falsify a great deal of the argument presented in the link you posted.

Dr. Peter Kreeft wrote a summation of the Summa, and added enough notes to it to allow the astute reader to understand the text (by, of course, starting with a definition of important terms :-). I highly recommend it.

Sorry, friend; Your use of the term “converse” and “contradiction require definitions before your objection can be made. After you have defined those terms, then we can go on to consider whether the term “God” has been properly defined and deployed. Ready, go!

Why do you think that you come to this assessment and millions have a
contradictory assessment to your point of view through Jesus Christ?
What is it that makes Christians different? Lastly what do Christians
have that those who refuse to put their faith in Jesus Christ and the Father of all Creation do NOT (One thing which then propagates a long list)?

Yes John Stevens, and the characteristics of God in the “BIBLE” are very human – jealousy, pride, vengeance, etc…. There is absolutely nothing in the “inspired inerrant BIBLE” that humans could not have dreamed up. So John we need a “revelation” in the Bible which is obviously from God as evidence. By a “deeper understanding”, Harry Pringle probably means an understanding of the historical processes that led to the collection of documents called the “BIBLE” and if Sarah Irving is a true historian it is very surprising that she has come to her new faith. Of course her new adoption of Jesus as saviour has nothing to do with a new understanding of truth but of her new-found “meaning of life” which it seems she lacked before her conversion. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t owe us a reason for existence so we find meaning in life as we can… The lack of evident absolute meaning is no excuse for adopting a faith in something without real evidence so that suddenly one’s life has “meaning”.

I didn’t “lift” any wording from anyone. The OT is full of the petty thoughts of an anthropomorphic god whose first 4 commandments (of 10) are all about himself. He orders the destruction of whole nations by his people (except for the young virgins of course) and on and on… I don’t have all week to respond unfortunately. Regarding quotes… You first Rob, I already asked John for a “revelation” in the Bible which could not be thought up by a human?

Revelation? Read Daniel. The skeptics dissed the prophecies in there saying they had to me written after the events because they could not be as accurate as they in fact were. Or alternatively, who wrote the story in the gospels? They are written as factual records of events that apparently happened, and that seems very likely according to modern scholarship. But as for your Old Testament claims — so what if the first four commandments are about God? So what? Does that tell us something? If God is all perfect as the Bible and philosophers have long believed, then worship is something deserved. Nobody is asking anyone to worship a human, or an angel, but only THE perfect being. Such a being deserves worship because that being in infinitely perfect. I’m afraid Jeff that you need a bigger God, in which case most of the issues you have would evaporate. Best, Rob

Apologies in advance for this. The one that is too tough for you. (John 6) Jesus divide humanity with one statement that showed exactly their true colours and it takes relationship with the divine to understand. In your current position you will never understand. You have NO understanding of this. Lets look at mankind. What does he do that is not all about himself?

it sounds like you misunderstand Christian belief of who the bible is God’s word and how it came to be. No-one believes that God himself wrote the bible though he did carve the ten commandments upon which all of mankind has and still uses a plumb line.

But to answer John Stevens, God declared that we are made in His image – is it that unreasonable to accept that we would exhibit His traits. But sin has twisted the traits and we turn those traits for evil. Jealousy (the English word jealousy isn’t a good translation of God’s jealousy in the original manuscripts) and anger in and of itself can either be righteous or unrighteous. And God has every right to be jealous of His creation (or angry with His creation), and we inherit the same characteristics in our love toward our children which is a jealous love (and should be… unconditional, always looking for the best for our children, never wanting them to stray or to suffer).

“humans could not have dreamed up”… that is an argument from foreknowledge. You can’t know what humans could possibly have “thought up” because the things that we think are up are not more than what has been laid out in the Bible. You obviously haven’t read the bible because it has plenty of supernatural occurrences and descriptions that are the basis for all of our mythical / fantasy worlds – different dimensions, spacial translations, supernatural healings/regeneration, resurrection, massive terrestrial upheavals, super human abilities, astounding cosmological events, even cape-like garments 🙂 And given God created it then it’s not unreasonable to accept that He can manipulate it as such.

“the universe doesn’t owe us a reason for existence” – and yet, no matter how much man tries to avoid it or play it down, even human being that has ever lived intrinsically searches for the reason for their existence, and worships something, even if it is themselves.

“lack of evident absolute meaning” – just because you are blind to the obvious existence of incredible wonder, complexity and order in the universe which scientific “fact” (not unprovable theory as some false claims are) bears out, doesn’t mean that there is a lack of evidence, on a lack of acceptance of the obvious evidence that we behold each day and is continually reinforced from science. So much of science today is not the search for truth or empirical evidence, but the search for something to prove that God doesn’t exist – hence why much of science is (and has been for a long time, and is ever-increasingly) “science by consensus”. Many, if not most of the great breakthroughs in science, came *despite* great opposition from the larger “scientific community” – even ones which did not challenge the notion of God, but simply because they upset the status quo. Pathetic really.

Wonderful writing about a beautiful experience of finding faith. I especially like this:

“sacrificial love is utterly opposed to the individualism, consumerism, exploitation, and objectification, of our culture.”

The most upsetting thing I find is when religious traditionalists fail to see the faults in their own culture.

A question though – I’m not very fond of the less logical and more exclusionary tenents of dogma of mainstream religions, but I think it’s important to be honest about them. Christianity (and similar religions) surely depend upon a concept of a spiritual after life. Your writing above plays that down. You haven’t abandoned the concept entirely, have you?

Shane, let me begin by saying I am an evangelical, the biblical kind, and if that were not enough, I am an ordained Baptist minister. I have engaged with others that asked questions much like yours. I would like to ask your forgiveness as a member of a body that has not understood, engaged, or listen to you. I am biblical but having said that I must also act biblically and love those that are not just like me. I have been hurt by the church and those in the church so I understand some of your feelings and I truly ask that you forgive me and some many thousands of others that have refused to sit down with you and listen and at least attempt to understand.
I would like to continue or begin a conversation but this is not the best medium. Here is my email if you wish to continue, m_pickle@live.com. Blessings

Mike, I have been awash in a sea of self-righteous rhetoric on this page and yours is the first comment I found that reached out to me with a tone of reconciliation and humility (aside from Sarah’s response to my original question). Thank you. I don’t know if I will contact you via your email but I am grateful to have seen your message.

Well, anytime Shane, I get the whole judging thing but I also know the righteousness of Christ. You pick the time. Email is internet base so it is there unless something untoward happens. I will respond. Blessings.

The bible is pretty clear on the homosexual lifestyle…now Yeshua went to all those who were sick and hurting and healed them, and told them, “Go and sin no more”, as he did to the woman who he saved from being stoned.

From God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the verses saying God considers it, an abomination, this is something hateful to him…its clear God made Adam and Eve, man and woman for marriage, and since God made the definition of this, only he can change it.

Satan twisted scripture in an attempt to deceive and tempt Christ in the desert, but it’s almost impossible to twist verses in way, shape, or form to say Yahweh condones this behavior. He wants all to be saved and be his children, but his love involves not letting people be deceived into doing things that will hurt them and others….the whole reason he sets ups laws (The Ten Commandments, 2 Greatest Commandemnts) is to protect us so that we have his best for us.

As for laws that discriminate, the US cases are just the opposite, as in the US we have the 1st amendment to the US Constitution for just these type of cases to protect Christians’ freedom of religion. Otherwise according to the LGBT logic, then LGBT bakers should be forced to make t-shirts or wedding cakes that have the verses from the bible talking about this sin being an abomination. Liberals these days hate logic and reason, and tolerance is for all except those who disagree with their views, who are then subject to the violent mobs we have seen sponsored by George Soros to cause division.

I LOVE the idea of bakers being forced to make T-shirts! And wedding
cakes with quotations from the bible saying “this sin” is an
abomination! What happy marriages they would mark the beginning of (when
many, many heterosexual couples enjoy non PIV intercourse, and have
done so forever).

The issue was not messaging – people are already free
to refuse to publish messages for any reason or none, but discriminating
against people for who they are. And it’s hard to see how Jesus would refuse to write a couple’s names on a cake.

The bible actually never says a
word about “the homosexual lifestyle” becauses there was no such thing
in those days, and Jesus is silent on homosexual activity. The OT verses
you rely on are ambiguous and subject to interpretation (against temple
prostitution etc.)

What’s always fascinating is how some Christians think that regulating where people put their genitalia is greater than all the other commandments.

error – “The bible actually never says a word….”
God’s word makes it very clear. Read 1 Corinthians 5 and 6 and see why in Romans 1 people were given to perversion. As Bob mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah like the Great flood stand as testament and warning for all time. Just as WW2 and wars in the last century should be clear enough. The impact of sin. Lets define sin. Sin is doing what you know you should not do and not doing the things that you know you should in word and thought and deed. YES How can anyone stand in this. Exactly ! We all have sinned and all are sinners everyday. With God’s help we can get to “Go and sin no more”. Seek to find out how there is a way in this maze of life. God has made a way. John 3:16

You elliped (word?) away the point of my sentence, that there was no such thing as “the homosexual lifestyle” in those days. Sexuality was understood very differently then. We have little idea how prevalent same-sex acts were, or how they were thought of. The bible does not use the word “homosexual” because it wasn’t coined until the late 19th century CE. It uses words with meanings like “soft” and “effeminate”. Present-day Christians are all too fond of imposing their present-day understanding on the past, and then claiming the past speaks to the present about present-day things.

No, sexuality was not understood differently in those days. What a nonsensical comment. This attempt to claim that homosexuality was not addressed in the bible is beyond silly. It is amazing the depths you are forced to. Maybe you believe such blather, but no sane person does.

You have no doubt studied Hebrew and also no doubt fully understand what the Bible says. You also fully understand Christians. Tell me this is not what I am reading you saying!

The acts that you speak of were well and truly the reason Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed and should make those who pursue such acts today “shake in their boots”.

Wisdom is learning from experience and a mistake is to repeat the same error twice. You are in denial my friend. In relation to John 3:16 God never stopped loving from the first man and woman. It is His nature. (1 John 4:7-12).
Your comments show you do not understand what happened at the cross.

What other aspects are in His nature and what do you expect the consequences of dark evil behaviour to be? Just maybe this throws a new light on John 3:16 especially in the context of who God is (1 John 1:5)

You follow a person like Richard Dawkins who has no understanding off what occured at the cross. Come to the cross my friend and look at exactly what happened there.

You must ask yourself these questions.

What would God’s reply be to those who deny Him? What might they be denied?

You beg far too many questions, for which my answers are quite different, for me to answer you here.
I do not “follow” Richard Dawkins. He has recently taken more than one position I don’t agree with. I merely sourced a word to him (maybe you should look it up: filicidal).

quite so…the pauline kione greek uses the term
“koinanae” which the squeaky clean concordances claim “does not translate”.
It certainly does translate. the greek roots say “them who go together in the rear”
which is popularly translated as the 19th century term “homosexual” but conveniently ignores the fact that “straight” couples can also do that, and they have two places where they can put it, rather than just one.
This is among the reasons that I tend to disregard the rantings of saul of tarsus. Meanwhile yeshua (“jeezus”) is quoted as saying nothing of the kind. I grant he did not say anything about “pedophilia” either, but nor did he offer a sermon on container freight.

see my above comments about saul of tarsus. i do find it somewhat amusing that he indicates a great deal of familiarity with “perversion” and is often also quoted as an authority on what a proper marriage looks like, given that he never married and apparently was quite close to “luke”.

You are sadly mistaken my friend. Clearly God is against such behavior also in the new testament. I challenge you to research the bible yourself, in the NT. There are several places this is very clear. Jesus “lowered” Himself by leaving the glory of heaven to “bridge” the gap between a Holy God (the Father) and fallen humanity. No matter how we try to spin it with our “intellectualism,” we always fall short. Our best cannot, and will never match God’s perfection. It’s our pride and stubborness that gets in the way of truth. I challenge you with an “open mind” to disprove God’s existence.

Ah, here we at last have it. He is relying on such bizarre arguments because he is, in fact, an atheist.

Notice how the atheist changes the subject. He has left off trying to say the bible says nothing about homosexuality, and instead trots out the fact that many people have different names for God throughout time to prove….that there is no God. Do you see the logical problem here? Atheist have great difficulty thinking straight oftentimes.

The fact that ancient peoples had different conceptions of God, and different ideas about God, to the atheist, means, to the sloppy minded atheist, that God does not exist! Back to school with you, young lad, time for a course on logic.

This is a beautiful article and many of you in these comments below are confirming the stereotype of Christians being self-righteous and judgemental. I am a Christian and I’m appalled at the lack of respect shown here for the views of others.

Mark 12:30-31New International Version (NIV)

30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these.”

indeed. the article does actually directly imply that the author has held more than one (now allegedly diametric) view or opinion or ideology or “belief” or whatnot, and given the photo I am dis-inclined to conclude that it made her head explode or anything.

Just because I believe in one fewer god than you (and many fewer than the pantheists) doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to comment on the internal inconsistencies and fallacies of ancient texts (especially when their promotors use them to attack me and my marriage as “sinful”).

It is a self-serving delusion (May I call the “the gods delusion”?) that everyone’s god/dess/es is/are “really” your god, under different names. The Romans did not believe Vesta was another name for Jupiter. Their gods and goddess were anthropomorphic, like yours, and you project your prejudices onto him.

“Any all-mighty deity worth its salt must have existed prior to and separate from the universe.”
I’m not very well versed in all the creation myths of the world, and nor it seems are you. Who are we to impose our mere human “musts” on the almighty gods? Who are you to say a god/dess could not reach back in time and create the universe and him/herself?

Sorry, I knocked out Allah and the Christian ones from a longer list, but missed Yahweh. The character of Allah and Yahweh are both so different from the christian god/s that they should probably have been included.

Yeah, the “cut and paste” comment wasn’t called for. I like someone who’s done their homework.

We all come at this question with presuppositions. Mine is the principle of cause and effect — the most scientifically supported principle you can think of. A couple guiding principles come out of this: 1. The cause comes before the effect, 2. The cause is greater than the effect and 3. The effect can’t be it’s own cause.

This presupposition informs my beliefs regarding origins. It weeds out a lot of the options right away.

“Mine is the principle of cause and effect — the most scientifically
supported principle you can think of.”
I don’t think it is. In fact, philospher David Hume disputed the existence of causality, and has not, so far as I know, been refuted. I can let go of a book and it falls to the floor as often as you like, but nothing proves that it will fall the next time I let it go. Modern science is casting real doubt on some concepts we thought we had our heads around. You know that your computer relies on particles in certain devices (tunnel diodes) passing from point A to point C without going through point B?

“The cause is
greater than the effect”
I have seen a disproof of this one. A tiny domino can knock over a larger one (up to a certain ratio), which can knock over a larger one, … which can knock over a HUGE one.

I like Richard Feynman’s description of our knowledge of the universe — we’re watching 4 squares on a chessboard and trying to guess the rules of the game.

Your domino illustration is not an example of the effect being greater than the cause. The finger is not the only cause of the domino’s fall. The pull of gravity on each domino adds to the energy to give each domino just enough oomph to topple the next from its metastable state. So as odd as it seems, the effect is not greater than the cause. You hinted at it when you said “up to a certain ratio”. That ratio shouldn’t really matter if it was something outside of normal causation.

“Hume is getting a little long in the tooth.” He’s not 2000 years old, though.
I never said “it was something outside of normal causation”, in fact if it were, that would defeat the point, which was that the cause of the biggest domino falling _over_ (gravity being only what makes it go downwards when it does fall) was the tiny pressure applied to the first tiny domino.

I’m not even sure how “The cause is greater than the effect” is even a meaningful statement. Greater in what sense?

In other words, the CAUSE of the domino falling. In the absence of gravity you couldn’t cause all the dominoes to fall with just that little push.
The cause of the second domino falling is not just your finger — it’s your finger plus the kinetic energy imparted by gravity’s pull on it. Energy is lost in the process through sound waves, pushing the air out of the way, not a perfectly elastic collision between dominoes, your fingertip transferring heat to the domino, etc. So the cause (in our case, your finger plus the earth’s gravitational pull) must convert more energy than is contained in the effect — that’s what’s meant by “the cause must be greater than the effect”.

Taking the system as a whole, yes, a lot of energy has been stored in the dominos before they start falling, but the cause of the dominos falling _when they do_ is nothing but the motion of your finger towards the first domino, much smaller than the effect.

Anyway, this is sophistry in terms of the creation of universes, because if you treat God as the cause of the universe existing, then you have to postulate something greater than Him to be the cause of Him. If you say he had no cause, then you can equally say the Universe had no cause.

Before your finger knocks over the domino, you made the decision to knock it over. So didn’t you really just knock it over with your mind? See the weirdness that happens when you arbitrarily limit the causal chain?

Rather than jumping directly to “God did it”, I stay with cause and effect. The first effect must be caused by an uncaused first cause. If the effect is “the universe”, the cause must have been greater than all the energy contained in the universe. The cause must have existed prior to the universe, the cause must be outside of time and outside of the universe, not made of matter, be capable of making choices, etc. These are just logical applications of the principle of cause and effect. We tend to call something with those attributes, God. It is my belief that it’s the God of the Christian/Jewish scriptures — your mileage may vary. But whatever It is, It’s going to be something an awful lot like the Christian/Jewish conception of God.

“The first effect must be caused by an uncaused first cause.”
You beg the question that there was a “first effect”, especially since time seems to have begun with the Big Bang. It is simply meaningless to say what was “before” that. And if your god is outside of space and time, then he cannot have wishes, hopes or disappointments, which are all time-bound.
Then your “must” has no basis in logic (or anything else). It’s just an assertion hanging in space. Who says it must? Why must it?
If every effect MUST have a cause, then there can be no “uncaused first cause”. And if it need not, then there can be a “first effect” without any “first cause”, caused or not.
And then, why must your “uncaused first cause” be anything like the Jewish or Christian gods (who are very different kinds of being)? It could be completely impersonal, like the god of the deists.

This argument is very old, and has been refuted many times before now.

Not really begging the question — just presenting a shortened version. The impossibility of constructing an actual infinite requires that there be a first effect.

You are content to invoke a miracle of uncaused effects. I, on the other hand, appeal to science and logic insisting that an effect must have a cause. Everything we observe indicates that nothing happens without a cause. And yet your position is that nothing caused everything.

Dig down into what many of these scientists and philosophers believe about the beginning. You’ll find all sorts of appeals to higher dimensional things and beings.

Regarding the personality of the First Cause: appealing to cause and effect again — the effect can’t be greater than the cause — I’d expect the personality of the First Cause to be greater and more complex than my own rather than less as the deist would posit.

” The impossibility of constructing an actual infinite requires that there be a first effect.”
Sorry, that sentence is the very definition of begging the question. You don’t know that it is “impossible to construct an actual infinite.” (by which I take it you mean, “to know the entire sequence of causes and effects by which the Universe came into being” – which assumes that it did come into being by a sequence of causes and effects. Time and space were so different back then that our concepts of cause and effect may be meaningless.)

There is no “Miracle of the Uncaused Effect” (I think you just made the expression up.) but if anyone is evoking it, it is you with your “First Cause” because what is s/he/it/them but an “Uncaused Effect”?

If you appeal to science, cite me the science text that says anything about cause and effect. That lies in the realm of philosophy, and scientists prefer to deal in correlations. And never mind what “scientists believe”. Real scientists prefer to propose as possibilities or probabilites, and leave belief to the religious.

And “the personality of the [f]irst [c]ause”? That begs the question that it has a personality, i.e. partakes of the qualities of a person. If there were no other persons about at the time, it becomes a mystery how it might manifest those qualities.

I want to say this nicely: you say I’m begging the question then show that you have no understanding of the topic — then you proceed to beg the question.

Please study some more. In the end, if you’re right it does not matter one bit to how I’m going to live my life. But if I’m right, it is of utmost importance to your life. Take all the time you need to read up the best thinkers on my side rather than the dumbest internet commenters you can find (I’ll freely admit my side is full of simpletons). CS Lewis is a good place to start.

Those who read my previous post carefully will see that it has already answered yours. Tom Paine pointed out the emotional blackmail inherent in Pascal’s Wager when he said “Scorn threat of Hell or bribe of Heaven”, and I for one can not turn belief on or off like a tap on the basis of the reward for belief or the punishment for disbelief. C S Lewis presented a false dichotomy about Jesus: a third possiblity/probability is that he was neither liar nor messiah but legend – a fragment of truth (perhaps) spun into fantasy.

I’m not proposing Pascal’s Wager: Hashtag believe, just in case. I’m only suggesting that you take time to study it up since the consequences of being wrong are extreme, while the consequence of disbelieving your current system is trivial.

“Legend” would actually be the fourth option. One of the Gospel writers, Luke (or “Luke”, if you prefer) is regarded as one of the best ancient historians. People, places, politics, etc are meticulously accurate. After doing all that painstaking research, then he just made some crap up and stuck that in there? With no discernible motive — Christianity didn’t wield any power until Constantine (and it shouldn’t have then — separation of church and state is in the Bible).
We have manuscripts copied over hundreds of years and 1000 miles (existing copies from the early 100’s) with no drift or change in the story — no developing legend.

You’ll recall this whole conversation began with someone asking how do you choose between all the competing beliefs. It’s my contention that almost all religions can be written off immediately because they fail the cause and effect test. Further study has convinced me that Judaism –> Christianity is actually true. It passes that test — and the Bible even mentions that it’s a good test!
“since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities-his eternal
power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from
what has been made (the universe), so that people are without excuse.”
So the choice really is between atheism and a very small handful of options.

Make sure you’re reading the source material, not someone’s “takedown” of it. We’ve seen enough stories where so-and-so “totally destroyed blah in six words”, when it wasn’t nearly all that.

You are indeed invoking Pascal’s Wager, and it is dishonest (and impossible for an internally honest person) to base their belief on fear or hope of the consequences.

You imply that “Luke” (or Luke if you prefer) wrote all of the text of the gospel of Luke as we now see it. Scholars say it is based on Mark, “Q” and a lost text.”the L source”, so your “painstaking research” is a straw argument.

“L” is not a lost text. It is the oral source that Luke himself references in the beginning of his history — interviews with eyewitnesses.

“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled or been surely believed among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”

“Q” is the “lost text”. A text that’s been proposed yet there is absolutely no manuscript evidence that it ever existed. There hasn’t been any indication of a drift in the text over the centuries. Tens of thousands of copies of NT writings, yet not a single “Q” copy? Highly suspect. The copies from isolated groups over Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa show no substantive differences. Not that it would even affect my point — fantastic historians would, of course, study the available written documentation.

Read Pascal’s words and compare them to what I’m saying. Pascal suggested you believe just in case — or act like you believe until you do. I agree this is intellectually dishonest. My humble suggestion is that you study the best arguments from “my side” from the source documentation — just because I care about you. It also happens to behoove you to do it, whereas, there’s no consequence if I don’t return the favor. Is it intellectually dishonest to check the bathwater before you put the baby in it? You check it just in case.

moreover, in the “ten commandments” the popular translation is “thou shalt hold no other gods before me” but it does not insist that they do not exist nor that no ceremonies to them should be done. rather i believe it is in exodus where moses is told that there are some standards about the construction of altars to those, and that they should not upstage the ones to yahweh.

First of all, I believe in the existence of a Creator because of the intricacy and beauty of Creation, the order in the universe, mathematical laws, musical laws, and so on. I do not believe that this could have come about without a guiding hand, and this belief has been shared by many scientists both now and through history.

I believe in the Bible because of the fulfilment of prophecy, the testimony of many witnesses, and also because of the power that knowing Jesus has had in my life, to change me from a depressed, violent and hateful person to one who is gentle and kind (though still not perfect). I have also seen this change in other people, including my father, who was an abusive parent when I was younger.

The Bible speaks of the gods of the nations as being demons, in both the Old and New Testaments. I also believe this to be true from personal experience and observation of the effects that these ‘gods’ have on people. Unfortunately people who call themselves Christians are often under their influence, which explains the atrocities that ‘Christians’ have carried out through history, and also the hatefulness that can be seen now in some quarters.

The test to know if someone is a true follower of Christ is whether they love their enemies and forgive those who do them harm, and if they have the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control).

I don’t know if you will count this as evidence at all, but hope you will do some more investigation. You may be surprised at what you find.

Thank you for your warm-hearted response. You do your religion credit.

Where belief is based on personal conviction, there is not much anyone can answer. The Argument from Design is well-refuted, but “musical laws” are new to me. Musical harmony can be explained by physics, the interference and reinforcement of air-pressure waves, and as with the chaos in the Universe, musical harmony emerges from a corresponding amount of musical chaos: modern “well-tempered” tuning is a series of compromises between the mathematical regularity of strict harmony and the desire to play in differnt keys on one instrument.

“The test to know if someone is a true follower of Christ is whether they
love their enemies and forgive those who do them harm, and if they have
the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control).”

I’m curious to know what you think of people who do all of those without claiming to be be followers of Christ. It sounds as though, since they pass the test, that they are followers without knowing it, which raises the question – if you believe in those “places” – whether you think they will go to heaven or to hell.

Hello again, I’ve been thinking for a while as how to answer you. These questions keep me awake at night, to be honest.

I suppose one could regard music in that clinical way, but it does not even begin to explain the emotional and spiritual effect that it has, even on other organisms besides ourselves. Why is it that we sing when we’re happy (until we get too old and self-conscious)? Not only that, singing and making music engender happiness. When I play the piano I often experience a deep peace inside me, like I have fulfilled one of my purposes for being. There is something more than the physical or mechanical happening here. One could say the same for art and poetry – the satisfaction that comes from making or experiencing something beautiful. Perhaps some people feel like that when they build a house or make a garden. We are more than machines.

Regarding heaven and hell, the former is the place where we will be with God, worshipping him forever. Most people do not want to to do that, preferring to worship something else. But if they are earnestly seeking the truth, Jesus promised that they will find him.

The marks of a child of God (the fruit of the Spirit) are not what must to do earn God’s approval, but what He does in us when we come to Him empty-handed, only believing His words. Like the thief on the cross, who knew he deserved punishment, but asked Jesus to remember him, and Jesus said that he would be with him that day in Paradise. And like Paul, once Saul of Tarsus, a rabid religious fundamentalist, who breathed violent threats against Jesus’ followers, until he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. This is the same man who wrote some of the most sublime passages in the Bible, and who died for the love of the one he called a blasphemer.

We are all looking for love and meaning. Is that an accident, a quirk of the random collisions of atoms in a heartless Universe, or is it an indication that we were meant for something more than mere reproduction? Is our meaning determined by ourselves (in which case, is it valid), or is there a higher meaning that can be sought and found?

the “tiny minority” is easily now in number that exceed the entire world population at the time these ministries took place that you glowingly claim to know all about. I am “weird” too, and I find your general arrogant tone toward people you obviously have never actually taken the trouble to understand, emblematic of why we have such disparate political swings in the united states.

ahoy, dude…if your view of humanity is hopelessly calvinistic, I hope you room with the likes of him in the afterlife since you pretty much deserve one another. I am not perfect and have no interest in being judged by some superhuman authority who expects me to be, nor any interest in being “forgiven” for something that I did not do.

Nor do I buy that yeshua was himself a calvinist. Incidentally I regard Calvin as a murderer, and if you actually knew anything about his brand of ideology, and especially his tendency to “enforce” it, you might not be so enamored of it.

Jesus never singles out homosexuality, but He does condemn sexual misconduct in general.

Matthew 15
17 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? 18 But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20 These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

Mark 7
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

The word translated (New International Version) as “sexual immorality” is “porneiai”/ “πορνεῖαι”, Strong Greek 4202. It’s sometimes translated “fornication,” would literally be surrendering or selling one’s sexual purity, and refers to all illicit sexual conduct. (Look up the other instances where the word is used in the New Testament before arguing it means anything else.)

“Jesus never singles out homosexuality,…” because He had no need to. The Word on homosexuality is clear. It is sin. Where Christ Jesus found error in teaching and understanding, He corrected. There was and remains no error in the Bible concerning homosexuality, but today the Word has been twisted to make it condone homosexuality. It does not.

it absolutely forbids murder. how many factual homsexuals, “accused” homosexuals, “suspected” homsexuals have been murdered by “christians”? since the “bible” has no term for two WOMEN together, I am forced to conclude that they would be simply lumped in with “witches” which were generally treated likewise.

Even if “being these” (regardless of factual accuracy) is some kind of sin, how does it figure in the continuum of believers murdering and torturing them?

Amazing how homosexuals remain silent on the Islamic slaughter of homosexuals even as they condemn Christians for something that isn’t happening. That some homosexuals have been killed by people whose faith may be Christian is not indicative of a Christian drive for the slaughter of homosexuals. In almost every case, you will find that the killer was a closet homosexual himself who did not want his proclivities revealed, as in the case of Matthew Shepard.

The hypocrisy of the homosexual community knows no bounds. It prefers to be silent on Islamic slaughter because of the homoerotic nature of Islamic societies and blame Christians for what Muslims do.

We are NOT silent on some Islamic sects’ murder of gay men. We condemn it unequivocally. The topic just hadn’t arisen here till now.

I love how you make the killers also gay, so you can blame them twice. It is the suppresson of same-sex love we see exhibited here that forces men into the closet, not just to the world, but to themselves. It is not fear of exposure that leads these men to kill, but being confronted with their own true orientation.

As for the supposed reason for our supposed silence, Islamic societies are not “homoerotic”, they just make women inaccessable to men. It may be that men there turn to weaker men as a substitute and dominate them as they would women. The gay community is antithetical to that.

Really? Which Islamic sects murder of homosexuals have you all spoken out publicly on? The Pulse murders? A former friend, a homosexual guy, told me to my face that those murders were because of Christian hate.

Cut the babble and deal with reality. Islamic societies are deeply homoerotic. That’s why they oppress women. That’s why their credo is: a man for pleasure, a woman for childbearing. That’s why Islam’s paradise contains boys with skin like pearls for the pleasure of men. That’s why birds fly with one wing in Kandahar.

moreover NON-sexual misconduct is quite common about the religious community- abject hypocrisy, violent acts, judgment of others, mis-use of money, lust for economic and political power…the list goes on

That the Bible and Christ Jesus are silent on homosexuality is false. Christ only corrected teachings that were in error. Moreover, He signified mercy for sinners via the woman taken in adultery. Nevertheless, his teachings on divorce signify only the man-woman relationship. Since the Bible is the Word and Christ Himself the Word, He does not and would not contradict His teaching on so sin. He never said adultery is good; instead, He said judge according to Law and with mercy. That may be applied to homosexuality as well.

There is no objective good to homosexual acts. Sexuality is not a neutral act as it is normally a reproductive act or unifies husband and wife for the good of their children. It is therefore either used toward an objective good or misused in an irrational movement away from an objective good.

So, of course, scripture and tradition are not silent on a grave sin. Even if they were it doesn’t pass the “movement toward an objective good” standard and we already know no sexual act is neutral.

It is very odd to imply that because Jesus is never reported to have mentioned same-sex divorces, he disapproved of same-sex marriage. He never reportedly mentioned interracial divorces, either, so may we assume he disapproved of miscegenation too? In the Deep South, they probably argued that he did.

Heterosexual acts are reproductive only a tiny fraction of the time (or we would be kilometres deep in people). Homosexual acts make their participants happy. Unifying two people of whatever sex for each other’s good is relatively good. “Objective good” is a mirage.

nowhere is he quoted as saying that. he does make some rather vague references to “divorce” but you cannot get “divorced” if you cannot marry in the first place. notice that in the OT, sex and procreation among unmarried partners, is neither universally forbidden nor especially to be avoided, and if it were uncommon, there would not be a rule about “adultery” as vaguely as that word apparently was culturally defined in those days.

And yeah, he does contradict himself in various ways. He says “render to caesar that which is caesars…” but he obviously objects to the use of the temple for “moneychanging” although arguably the temple priests were also effectively regional government. The story about the “temple of the moneychangers” does not explain WHAT the “money” was being used for, and the popular guess is that it was for buying of some kind of indulgences among the wealthy, but I do not know of any actual text that says so.

In his culture, the penalty for a woman engaging in “adultery” was death by stoning. Oddly enough, NOTHING IS SAID AT ALL about the man/men with whom she presumably engaged in this (since naturally it could not have been a woman like ruth). In this, I must insist, lies an ENORMOUS double-standard, but it is somewhat dwarfed by the ones we now practice in a much more heavily populated world.

You are reading the Bible without understanding. The legal point of the woman taken in adultery is the law that must be applied to both parties, not to one. The theological issue is the universality of the human condition before God: we are all sinners.

No, Jesus does not contradict Himself. You do not understand what you are reading.

I would recommend that you read the Bible without the biases and false presuppositions that have been drummed into your head. I don’t know if you belong to the homosexual community and don’t care, but I do know that from that community has come a false hermeneutic intended to claim that homosexuality is not sin. Get that lie out of your head, read the Bible, and understand that we are all sinners, and all sin is equal in the sight of God.

how generous of you to shed your unlimited knowledge upon this festering mass of unwashed non-readers. I dont wanna shock you but I am pretty much familiar with the stuff you claim me to not know.
There is NO basis to claim that the “law must be applied to both parties” according to legal concepts of the period. Judaic law applied to jews, roman law to romans. Women were not permitted to testify in either legal culture. They were regarded as chattel, as were slaves.
Nor is there any particular reason to regard this notion as having especially changed with the popularity of “the way” (apparently the popular phrase for yeshua’s ministry). Since for example, the synoptic gospels all pretty much agree that mary magdalene was the primary eyewitness to most of the CRITICAL POINTS OF HISTORICAL occasion, that modern christian apologism bases itself (that is the crucifixion and the “rising”). Yet there is NO BOOK attributed to mary madgalene. Her “testimony” is not believable because she was a woman.

I am somewhat shocked at the inanity of your comment. The bible pretty clearly condemns homosexuality over and over again. So you simply pretend that it does not. How strange. You must have gone to college. Jesus was very clear about marriage being between a man and a woman. If you don’t get that, you have no business pretending that you understand Jesus at all. Jesus never spoke about pedophilia either, do you claim it is OK simply because Jesus never said anything about it? Lame is the only word I can think of. No, the old testament verses are not ambiguous. How Lame.

It never occurred to anyone, until very recently, that marriage (the union of a man and woman under the law to protect the children of that union, the woman and the man) concerned anyone but men and women together. The ridiculousness of suggesting that there is a union of two parts which are not complementary is epic. Why would anyone up to recently have to mention that?

You’ve clearly never had sex with someone of the same gender. I can tell you now it is perfectly complementary and their is nothing ridiculous about it. The LGBT state of being has subsisted in human culture for millennia, variously celebrated in hundreds of cultures and considered a gift in others. But my original post was not about whether homosexuality was a sin, it was whether Christians could peacefully practice their religion in a pluralist society. Your statements make it clear that it cannot.

Well, Christianity is at odds with the world, so a pluralist society will not be at peace with a true Christian. Christ himself told us to not be surprised with the world hates us, because it hated Him first.

if you are so “at odds” with the rest of the world, you are not following the example associated with narratives about your prophet:
Jesus’ entire adult life was characterized by a deep concern for the spiritual condition of the nonbeliever. He saw them as desperately lost, and His heart was broken because of that. His compassionate purpose for their well-being was deep-rooted, and He showed this concern specifically in the way He met them where they lived, fed them, taught them, and healed them (Matthew 9:9-11; Mark 1:33-34; 6:30-42; Luke 5:1-11).

that is, yeshua kept company with publicans and sinners. his mission, as he described, was to offer something to THEM, not to spend his time preaching to the choir. that was more a saul-of-tarsus (paul) thing and you might notice I am not in the habit of quoting him.

So now you’re talking about legal marriage. The reason gay men and women want legal marriage is because people who are not married have in the past been treated as strangers in law, resulting in vast unhappiness, for example concerning visitation rights in hospital, life-support, inheritance, etc. etc. etc. And of course religious gay people want to marry in their own churches.

In fact there are mediaeval and classical accounts of same-sex wedding ceremonies, so your argument that “it’s never been heard of before”, which is not an argument, is false.

“Pretty clearly” is pretty vague. The word “homosexuality” was not coined until the late 19th century. The words the bible does use can be interpreted in different ways. What’s very clear is that the people who are determined to interpreting them to mean “the homosexual lifestyle” would be against “the homosexual lifestyle” whatever the bible said. Contrariwise, “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Sam 18:1) describes very well the love of two gay men.

“Jesus never spoke about pedophilia either”. I always understood that “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe
in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and he were cast into the sea.” (Mark 9:42) would include paedophilia – though typically, it seems paedophilia against unbelieving children didn’t count.

“Lame”? Are you prejudiced against people with mobility issues too (as well as education)?

“marriage” today and then as well, was essentially a LEGAL relationship. the fact that the ceremony was typically done by some kind of religious official, does not especially change that. It was established mostly for the purpose of determining lineage and right of inheritance to progeny of accumulated wealth.
I has little to do with “sex or procreation” beyond that, and the OT is rife with examples of that, especially with respect to servitude or plural marriage.
I have had sex over a dozen times. I have never procreated as far as I know. Whether my partner was male or female or nobody at all, is none of your business. How is that , for unambiguous.

Fascinating. The cake bakers are not regulating your genitals. The cake bakers do not want to PARTICIPATE in a grave sin; ie a homosexual “marriage” as oxymoronic as that phrase is. If “who you are as a person” has to do with the celebration of a union that is impossible, that’s sad and irrational. Aiding in the celebration places the baker in the situation of abetting very grave sin, one that Aquinas said was worse than a man and woman fornicating because it is outside the natural law.

What’s really fascinating is that YOU think that you can demand that others sacrifice their eternal souls (whether you believe that or not, they do) to celebrate in your grave sin. Find someone with a less coherent ontology who doesn’t care about their eternal soul, they are everywhere. How you think that you and your ideology should determine how others, who have freedom of religion, act in reference to their eternal life is absolutely cruel. You;re actually suggesting that having to not target Christians and step next door for your impossible union cake is somehow more horrific than demanding that someone sacrifice their soul.

That’s not only shallow, but cruel.

Newsflash, there is a lot more to Christianity than not wanting to participate in others’ grave sin. How every discussion has to center on less than 3% of the population’s desire to make a hysterical fuss over a minor prohibition is comical.

i’m not really that enamored of “dagny’s implicitly irrevokable association. as I recall, I did have genitals quite a long time before I got married. And I did eat cake all the while.

WRT “saving eternal souls” from some kind of cardinal sin apparently involving cake decorating, might I remind you guys that saul of tarsus (the “apostle” paul) freely admitted to being accessory to murder. Yet he is sanctified these days in popular christian apology, only after yeshua, and quoted MUCH more often although the two people never actually met face to face despite being contemporaries prior to yeshua’s execution.

Feel free therefore to tell me all about how “grave sins” make us in jeopardy for our “eternal souls” and quote someone other than a known and admitted accessory to murder, to provide a credible reason why I might accept such arguments.

oh, and I cannot resist pointing out that thomas aquinas apparently had at least one rather traumatic experience associated with sex (whether he was actually committed to celibacy prior to it or not, is unclear) but if he decided to be celibate after that experience, I doubt he was really making much of an implied sacrifice.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas#Early_life_.281225.E2.80.931244.29

just offhand, one man’s “minor prohibition” is another man’s capital offense, punishable by not only death but extensive prior torture. this is much larger than a “cake” thing, and to suggest it is only that, is a slippery slope that only the worst of armchair philosophers would offer and actually expect that it would not draw some unequivocal rejection.

Bob is mostly correct–or at least, his interpretation is in line with the Bible and with how Christianity has always been practiced. And THIS, my dear Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, is why I can’t share your notion that the Bible and Christianity are all good after all, and that they fulfill your longing for human meaning better than a secular philosophy.

You contend that the Bible and Christianity cannot be good – simply because they are opposed to homosexuality? You throw away the true basis of Western Civilization because you don’t like that one aspect. Odd.

i did also find it rather annoying that she is said to have somehow made a HUGE logical leap to the effect that “…universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism…”
which appears to be a pre-christian worldview that she later criticizes implicitly by insisting that god does not like an un-examined faith. Neither, would I submit, that “non-god” would “like” an unexamined atheism. And from her narrative above, that is what I am inclined to conclude she had. With such an unexamined “faith” or “lack thereof”, she was a sitting duck for whatever kind of alternative ideology/theology that would strike her on the road to damascus.

and with regard to some other statements further above this thread, my impression of missionary christians is not that they are trying to “bring god” to unbelievers, but rather “bring christianity” (especially their own stripe of it) to whomever they seem to think do not already embrace it. I would also submit a lot of the prior thread items as evidence that, even where dealing with other “believers” of different stripes, “well meaning conceit” is not especially rare among those who fancy themselves somehow great authorities about the nature of god, even though the KJV/canon does not really explain much about that at all. So I really wonder how they presume to be so sure they know it.

The Bible tells us why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed and it’s not homosexuality.

“Now
this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were
arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” Ez.16:49

Even if we take “detestable things to mean homosexuality–a stretch in this context, imo–it still not THE reason, or even the primary one.

Willful blindness in reading Scripture is not a good thing. You need to look at the Flood and God’s promises before you say this. That God is not wiping us off the face of the earth does not mean he condones sin in the flesh. Do yourself a favor and read Leviticus, in particular. The point of the Book of Leviticus is the inestimable holiness and purity of God who hates all sin.

Thank you for the patronizing attitude. My scriptural knowledge is fairly extensive and my hermeneutic is hard-fought, but I’ve had enough of these discussion to know that once someone starts accusing you of “willful blindness”, the discussion is over. Have a good evening!

Since you understand the nature of God, an incredible accomplishment by the way, and since your understanding directly contradicts the actual Bible could you please write your own Gospel so poor ignorant souls such as Jiminimy and myself can be uplifted (and entertained).

Thanks for letting me know that you have never read the Bible. Your language indicates that there is no possibility of any kind of reasoning together with you. So, I shake the dust from my feet and leave you to yourself.

oh, I get it, in order to have a legitimate opinion, we have to all read the bible. Never mind that there are literally hundreds of versions. All different. The origin of which, has one thing in common: the original text from which they are derived, no longer exists. The timeline of the “historical accounts” cannot be reconciled. The claims are un-provable, the claims about miraculous healing cannot be verified, and the details are scant enough that no physical evidence to support their fantastic assertions, has ever been found. Some of the places mentioned, do still exist, and in other cases, some ruins have been located, but those do not prove that the indicated events, actually took place there.

So exactly HOW MUCH MORE do I have to read, after being aware of the above?

The same 8th would require you to believe me when I say that I’ve spent lots of time honestly studying the scriptures and arrived at different conclusions than you. The difference is, I’m not questioning whether or not you’re acting in good faith when you read the Bible. Maybe arrogant would have been a better word than patronizing?

the fact of whether you happen to be satisfied with your own argument or ideology, does not stand as a justification for anyone else to buy it. Either you have a compelling argument to SUPPORT YOUR ASSERTION or you don’t.
And to assume that whatever unstated-arguable-logic satisfies you, should automatically satisfy everyone else, is kind of patronizing, if not arrogant.

And no, they’re not, any more than your (presumably Reformed) theology is preventing you from understanding the nature of God. I would say Reformed theology badly mis-emphasizes certain aspects of God but would not presume to know how any particular individual views God based on that opinion.

I don’t mean to be testy. But this happens every time I say something that disagrees with anything in the fundamentalist camp–condescension and question of my spiritual honesty/intelligence because of doctrinal differences. It gets old and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what they’re trying to accomplish. I grew up conservative. I know all the arguments and don’t find them compelling anymore. Pray for my soul if you must but please don’t pretend to know my heart.

Hmmm. What do we do this this passage? “just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”
‭‭Jude‬ ‭1:7‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Or this… no mention of lack of hospitality….“Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.”
‭‭Colossians‬ ‭3:5-6‬ ‭ESV‬‬

That’s a fair question. In all honesty, what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah was certainly the result of more than one thing. I think there are legitimate interpretations of this passage besides homosexuality (unnatural desire is literally translated “strange flesh”). I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that their immorality was a next step after their choice to forsake the least of these. Mostly I just want to point out that using S&G as a clobber text against those who affirm LGBT is not as straightforward as it’s usually presented.

I’d like to give some “lightening from on high” kinds of answers but I’m still sorting out my own beliefs on this particular issue. I just want to be inclusive of the whole text o the Bible and not read S&G as being just about homosexuality.

yep, and “strange flesh” could mean something as simple as intermarriage between tribes (still all semitic) let alone such congress with goyim (totally alien, you know…) although the latter is mentioned as a “city” in the wiki I cited above. So it’s entirely possible that marriage with non-jews, might have been among the unforgivable things that yahweh fried them for.

oh, wait, “surrounding cities”? Why were THOSE not destroyed then? Which cities were these- only the ones which “surrounded” or some that were “nearby”? The wiki provides further details: there were several “cities” and only one of them remains today. So the interpretation of the story is that for some reason, one city was spared. We do not know why, since apparently the “angels” failed to find even TEN people in each town, who suited their sensibility. And Lot’s wife, who WAS apparently acceptable, was killed anyway.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah

since the commandments do not appear to be “numbered” I am guessing that you refer to the one about “adultery” therefore please explain why the items I mentioned above, do not constitute that. Exodus does not indicate they are, rather in the sections following exodus 20, they belabor a variety of details about how manservants and maidservants are to be treated, and they do not appear to especially forbid “going into” the maids, but might be taken as forbidding male owners “lying with” manservants or beasts; for female heads of households doing likewise it is unclear about that.

okay so it is “false witness” to incorrectly quote someone? Is that different from an intentional mis-representation? How do you know what the motive was, unless you can question the source of the statement, and even THEN do you automatically know “motive”?

exactly how “hard fought” are your hermeneutics if you just bail when someone offers a compelling counter-argument? Is that battle for which you apparently congratulate yourself, strictly an internal one? We have all fought some of those, and I am not expecting a medal for mine.

I’m not sure if this addressed to me, but after dozens of these conversations over the course of years, I’ve just learned to recognize when it’s a waste of time. And an accusation of willful blindness means that there’s nothing that can be said to facilitate good-faith discussion, as all disagreements will be treated as things I know to be invalid but say anyway.

my use of the “hard fought” line was not necessarily directed at you. as I (vaguely now) recall, someone else also used that phrase, possibly quoting you, and implying that he/she could therefore make statements without having to defend the logic behind arriving at them.

As I cogitate further on this, it is possible that the originator of the “willful blindness” phrase, might have been the one who co-opted your “hard fought” line. Or I am just on drugs.

yeah, looking back at the thread, I don’t think this was really directed at you, just at the sub-thread. Let’s just say that “walking away from it” is not one of my strong suits. I somehow I think I need to learn that one.

oh yeah, the “flood” story. here is why I don’t buy it: mount ararat is over 14000 feet altitude. there simply is not enough moisture ON THE EARTH, ANYWHERE to provide a flood that would raise the ENTIRE EARTH’S OCEANS to a level that would leave the “ark” high enough on that mountain that nobody has ever found it. If you confuse legends with facts, you end up with difficult “positions” to defend like the ones that totally violate known physics.

you DO KNOW of course that “leviticus” is directed toward the levite tribe, that of the rabbinic class, who were apparently held to a DIFFERENT STANDARD in judaic culture, from the rest of the tribes. You could not be a rabbi if you had some kind of physical imperfection (such as missing a finger).

I did not notice anything ELSE forbidding gay sex (lying with a man as with a woman, whatever) until cornithians. Which was by saul and luke, who never met yeshua hence cannot claim to have been actual students of his teaching.

Yeshua himself never said anything about what forms of sex were okay. He did imply that “marriage” was special, but if you culturally forbid same-sex-marriage, then how can you claim that same-sex “acts” are therefore inherently immoral or something like that? If you forbid them to marry, then ANYTHING THEY DO would have to be outside of marriage, wouldn’t it?

ironic, then since god created all humans and all humans are somehow permanently associated with sin. either from some far-fetched association with “the garden” incidents, or later inventions of neo-Calvinism.
really, if humans are that lousy of a creation, I have to point my lousy finger at the errors of whatever/WHO-ever created us.

how odd that the “god who hates sin” and apparently possesses unlimited power and knowledge, has NOT chosen to “wipe us off the face of the earth”.

Rather the earth appears to contain more live humans today than it ever has in recorded history. And that teeming population (by conservative estimates) would be ten percent gay.

Not only have gay “lifestyles” not been vaporized, they now are recognized in many countries to actually HAVE CIVIL RIGHTS and such people are no longer expected to tolerate protracted and violent random victimization by people who apparently believed themselves to be divinely inspired. Most countries which are lead by conscientious people, further recognize that gay families can be not only stable and fulfilling to their partners, but desirable in a community as they contribute stability heretofore only recognized for “straight” couples, and such family units routinely raise well-adjusted children, both gay and straight.

And, as it follows, quite a few of those “divinely inspired” actors, now occupy prison cells. It is all very nice that people claim to have “heard god speak to them” but if this god is telling them to beat a stranger senseless or to death, I am more likely to presume such a person to be severely mentally ill, rather than some kind of spiritual leader, entitled by God, to “wipe…from the earth…” some presumed misanthrope or other by virtue of some obscure bible verse.

not only that, but “sexually immoral” is hopelessly cultural. in those days, you could “go into” a maidservant of your household to make babies. that was okay. and you were REQUIRED to “go into” the surviving wife of your dead brother, if she was still of childbearing age. No discussion about whether she herself actually desired this in either above case. Perhaps this could be called “lack of hospitality” if she refused.

That’s a good point. Especially in the pre-Law Pentateuch, what is moral and what isn’t is not exactly spelled out. If all you had to guide you was Creation through Jacob you’d have a very hard time extracting a system of morality from it at all, let alone sexual morality specifically.

if you are so sure that your spin on this point is correct, let’s see chapter and verse that supports it. and leviticus doesn’t wash: that is for the priest class, who were enforced an entirely different set of standards, including the cardinal sins of wearing mixed woven cloth, eating shellfish, and allowing mildew on their garments. Paul (saul of tarsus) doesnt wash either since he was a later adherent to “the way” and he never personally knew yeshua but rather was a very hostile enemy to “the way” as heretic of proper judaism, at least until the damascus road incident which was after yeshua’s execution anyhow.

“Read the Bible as a letter to you by God,” said the Christian whose Bible consists of 66 books written over vastly different time periods by 66 or more different authors, reflecting those authors’ own unique voices. The Bible contains multiple genres from poetry to prose to prophecy and is written for audiences from ancient tribal Hebrews to exiled-era Jews to Gentiles in the Roman empire.

But sure, the best way to make the Bible clear is to read it as if it was all one giant “letter” written “to you”, a person in the 21st century, by the hand of God himself.

i more or less would agree that leviticus does not condone it between male members of the priest class, calling it an “abomination” but that word is rather vague, and could be taken to mean something as venial as “culturally unfamiliar”. And it is right up there with eating shrimp in that regard.

“agenda” and “bible” are hopelessly enmeshed. there is no “original” extant of the NT text, and quite a lot of ongoing debate as to whether the popular KJV version of the OT is even really that faithful to the tanakh. The “bible” is not a “letter to me by God” any more than this text is a letter to YOU by God. It was written by humans and they are just as fallible as I am.

Now if the points that you assert are about the available TEXT, as a work worthy of critical evaulation, at least we have something to talk about. But you have to assert a specific point. I am not going to read the entire phone book, to call fred jones. Please make your point. And if you infer some argument based on INTERPRETATION thereof, be advised that I generally do not recognize any authority to make a “better” interpretation than anyone else. I do not care who “believes” and who “does not”.

The sin of Sodom is what He said, in both Genesis and also in Ezekiel. Genesis covers the sexual immorality aspect of it, and Ezekiel covers both. Both Genesis and Ezekiel are the word of God; we can’t just vote one off the island. There’s probably a relationship between the two, if we were wise enough to believe them both, instead of choosing which one to ignore according to the personal inclinations that dictate our politics.

sodom and gomorrah, according to the story, were entire villages if not cities (by the standards of the time). They were not individuals. So are we therefore claiming that these ENTIRE VILLAGES (okay with the possible exception of Lot’s family) engaged in the same kind of sexual practices? Really? WHO GATHERED THAT INFORMATION? The verses do not even remotely explain that.
So does it follow that some “mayor” person, just ORDERED everyone to engage in some kind of sex act that was supposedly forbidden everywhere else?
Apparently Lot’s wife (who was “nice enough” to be allowed to leave) then committed the CAPITAL SIN of “looking back” and was killed, just for that. I think if I’m gonna be killed, I might as well do something more fun first.

re “God destroys no one for their lack of hospitality”. It seems ezekiel disagrees with you. I wonder where you got this statement from. Yeshua himself seems to have EMPHASIZED kindness to strangers, if I am interpreting the “lazarus” and “robbed man by the roadside” stories. Yeshua goes so far as to mention that the “good samaritan” (alien, of another tribe, as a martian would be to humans in these days) looked after the stricken man. Yeshua clearly advocates such kindness, which is far beyond common hospitality.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah are told in Genesis, which pretty clearly lays out the reasons why they were so wicked, and homosexuality was among the top ones. Your silly attempt to avoid this pretty clear lesson of the bible is just sophistry. You have to go to the book of Ezekiel, where God is deploring the sexual license then extant in Jerusalem, and he is complaining because Jerusalem is even worse than Sodom in its ‘detestable ways”. In this particular passage that you quote, when read in context, it is pretty clear what ‘detestable ways” means – it means sexual license and promiscuity of all sorts, and that includes homosexuality.

Well, Genesis doesn’t say they were destroyed for homosexuality, and Ezekiel DOES say they were destroyed for not caring for “the least of these”. So I’ll take the place where it actually gets specific, thanks. And there are lots and lots of sexual sins. There’s no evidence from those passages that homosexuality was one of the major factor in their destruction.

I’m not even settled on where I fall on LGBT (I think Romans presents some challenges) but I hate this lazy eisegesis stuff.

great, so in order to keep the bad guys from behaving homosexually, it’s better to give them your daughter(s). let’s just say that I might take a somewhat different view of the lengths a host might go to, in order to prevent homosexual acts, and the host’s daughters might tend to agree with me on this.

Where shall we start? Perhaps first we should peruse the CDC website that lays out the many diseases that homosexual activity produces. Putting things in places where they are not supposed to go is not good for the health. Numerous problems are associated with the gay lifestyle, among them alcoholism, oh, and remember AIDS – that was a problem, was it not? Suicide rates are high, mental health problems abound, and on and on.

Ever hear of Grindr? This is an app that allows gay men to arrange for sexual liaisons with anonymous men. Having many sexual partners is in itself a health risk. Straights have similar sites, but use them on a per capita basis much less. Homosexuals, according to several studies, have literally thousands or hundreds of sex partners in their lifetimes. Now, do you imagine such behavior is altogether healthy, emotionally or physically? Even those in gay marriages arrange to have sex with anonymous men so frequently that they have to have pre set arrangements with their partners that this will take place.

I could go on for a lot longer, but the evidence is all out there on the internet for people to find who want to find it. The question that must be asked is why are homosexuals unable to reign in this intense lust?

Name a disease that homosexuality produces, ie is the cause of. What disease is associated with homosexuality that cannot also be found in heterosexual groups? Is alcoholism and the other things caused directly by homosexuality, or because of the constant denegration of the person’s sexual orientation? Is it the act of homosexuality that causes alcoholism, or the rejection a religious society heaps upon the person?

You are confusing correlation with causation.

A dating application does not demonstrate whether homosexuality is wrong or right.

This is a very foolish argument: You were asked how same-sex attraction and involvement causes harm, and you offer diseases, which are caused by bacteria and viruses, and which are preventable and curable. They care nothing for the sex of the participants.

“Putting things in places where they are not supposed to go is not good for the health.”
I see no Christian crusade against the many sex toys that heterosexuals use, nor any prying into mix-sexed couple’s bedrooms to see which organs they are putting where.

“I could go on for a lot longer, but the evidence is all out there on the
internet for people to find who want to find it.”
And boy do you want to find it!

“The question that must
be asked is why are homosexuals unable to reign in this intense lust?”
The answer is quite simple, but lost in the fact that you – like virtually everyone who takes this stand on this topic – completely ignore lesbians. Gay men have lots of male partners (when they do, many don’t) not because of anything to do with homosexuality as such, but everything to do with male sexuality, because they are both men.

Your comment and the thread following it are the perfect example of why I asked Sarah to explain how her concept of “radical love” can be reconciled with broader society. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah means nothing to me as a non-Christian, yet it means everything to me as a gay man because it is repeatedly evoked to bash, demean, and dehumanize my community in, frankly, violent and abusive ways.

It is not our role as non-Christians to come to God, it is your role as Christians to bring Him to us, and if we choose to reject Him, that is our choice and you must respect that.

The condescending and self-righteous tone of your comment, its complete lack of humility, and recourse to paternalistic arguments about God “protecting us” is the same tone that underlies gay conversion clinics that drive LGBT teenagers to suicide and self-harm, it suffuses the quiet support of social conservatives, including Christians, who condone gay bashings and murders of LGBT persons all over the world, and leads to the banishment of children from homes because the families of LGBT people fail to practice the one fundamental requirement of your religion which is love.

I asked Sarah to explain herself because she represents people like you. All Christians speak for each other and when one of you raises a hand against the LGBT community we don’t see God’s love. We see selfish, fearful bigots who have taken the word of God to use it as a rod against people who need his love most of all.

Let me be clear, statements like yours drive people further away from God. Think on that when you wonder why so many are turning from His grace.

Hello Shane, I just wanted to say I am extremely sorry about how the love of Christ is tragically misrepresented so often. I definitely used to think and act self-righteously as well, especially toward people in the LGBTQ community. My perspectives regarding these topics may be different from yours, but please understand that I really care about you man. As a college student, I know that people really want a secure sense of identity and to know that they are loved unconditionally. I’ve certainly dealt with my own share of sexual immorality, but one thing I’ve learned is that it’s God’s kindness that leads people to a changed mind, not threats from people quoting verses in a demeaning way. And I have a diagnosis of OCD on my record, with one of the symptoms being intrusive thoughts, so I know what it’s like to have sexual thoughts/images of men as well. One thing that the Holy Spirit has shown me is that it’s not a sin to experience thoughts or temptations, but rather what we do with them. I understand that many people have developed attractions that have existed for as long as they remember, and haven’t found a way to change them no matter how hard they’ve tried. I encourage you to look up Christopher Yuan who has a lot to share on his experience with homosexual attraction and then coming to know Jesus.

As for your question to Sarah regarding the fact that she represents everyone who identifies as Christian, I encourage you to simply look to Jesus. I know that many of us tragically don’t understand the God we claim to know, but Jesus “is the invisible image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Whether or not people represent our Father rightly, please know that Jesus does! All God wants is a relationship with his sons and daughters.

It’s completely up to you, but the one thing I would ask of you is that you simply ask Jesus to show himself to you. I promise you he wants to, because he really values you Shane! You are worth His life, and he would have died for just you.

And if you want to connect, feel free to shoot me a Facebook message or send me an email at johnathanford@gmail.com if you can’t find my profile. Whichever you prefer.

i admire your attempt to build bridges. I cannot speak for shane nor would I presume to, but I do wonder this: now that you have sort of come around to recognizing that LGBT is not strictly “a set of acts” but both a lifestyle and a fundamental form of human orientation with the gods, I have a question:
what do you think about the phenomenon of a stable, committed gay or alternative relationship and the establishment of a family unit thereupon?

I regret to inform you that the laws in the United States do not protect your right to discriminate against a particular group. The founding fathers wanted there to be a complete separation of church and state so that no one religion could exert undue influence on the laws of the land. History and context do not support your assertion that the constitution protects your right to discriminate based on your personal beliefs. Your viewpoint also goes against the very words and ideaologies of Jesus himself. Jesus welcomed, dined with, loved on, and built relationships with everyone he encountered other than the Pharisees. Jesus preached a strong message of love your neighbor as yourself through words and actions. The proper response would be to bake the cake, build the relationship, and perhaps have the opportunity to speak “truth” into that person’s life through that relationship; perhaps even without using words. Jesus also said “whoever is without sin cast the first stone”. I find it interesting you don’t know your bible well enough to quote it in context using actual scripture references.

yeshua did not claim to heal with his own power, but with that of yahweh “my father”. according to the narratives, he did implicitly have the ability to imbue others with the channeling of such healing power, if you buy the stories which say that he gave that to other disciples before he sent them forth.

I did notice that their subsequent exploits to that effect, strangely are not described in the KJV canon, since so much emphasis is placed upon yeshua’s free-healthcare approach.

And meanwhile I find it odd that today, the right wing regards single-payer healthcare (not even “free”) as socialistic and especially repugnant. That item is one of a long list of glaring double-standards that I find very disappointing.

“yeshua did not claim to heal with his own power, but with that of yahweh “my father”.”

I keep running into people who insist that Christianity is a monotheistic religion, yet say this kind of thing. It’s a pretty basic question. Do Christians believe in one god or more? Was Jesus God or not?

no, I don’t recall that it did either. jubadoobai just seems especially interested in it. and apparently so was saul of tarsus. who never married and traveled all around the known world with a guy known as “luke”. Neither of them were apostles, having never actually met yeshua (jeezus) and saul (paul) was never granted such status by simon-peter either. Luke was not even a disciple of yeshua directly, but was rather a disciple of saul. in “acts” simon-peter indicates having met saul and spent some time with him, discussing religious ideology apparently, but not actually entirely grasping the ideology of the latter. simon-peter appears to be more or less okay with saul using “the way” brand, as long as he did it on the other side of the known world.

I really do not regard this apparent narrative as an especially glowing review of the pauline teachings, nor is there any particular evidence that simon-peter had read, or heard much of, what apparently survives as at least half of the New Testament. I have to assume that it had not even been written yet. And I am inclined to take the “corinthians” discussion of homosexuality, as I do the rest of the pauline stuff. With a grain of salt the size of New Hampshire.

Peter Singer is not my idea of where to start in philosophical thought. He seems cold and merciless towards the helpless and disabled. The world is full of generous-hearted and happy humanists and secularists who would be better exemplars. I get the impression Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is a little shortchanged in the thinking for herself department. The first question her essay raises is, Why Christianity? Many other religions and philosophies, notably Buddhism, are deeply imbued with values of compassion and the valuing of others. It seems she literally chose the first one she saw.

“The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason?”

The capacity of every one of us to reason is compromised, all the time, compared to someone else’s capacity to reason, and the best reasoner is not necessarily the most valuable (Bertrand Russell was a cad). That is not what gives us value.

I prefer to start from the Golden Rule, which is actually quite selfish. I value others and will not mistreat them because I am valuable and don’t want to be mistreated. No need for non-material beings, let alone human incarnations, transubstatiations, etc. etc. etc.

Typical: attack the person. If Sarah hadn’t changed her position then she would be a thinking person. Because she thinks a different way from the athestic world view and has come to different conclusion, then she lacks good thought processes. The golden rule is a rehash of Jesus’ words, ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’ Only He said it when it was a completely radical thought. The Gospels reveal a God you can trust; Jesus loved and cared for people and only reacted to hypocrisy and people who falsely represented God.

Most atheists lack a belief in a god because they don’t feel the evidence is either sufficient or compeling. All the wrestling over values, beliefs, philosophies are side shows. It all starts with demonstrating the existence of the deity in question.

Atheists ‘feel’ the evidence is not convincing enough that God exists. That’s a philosophical position isn’t it? Humans are not just physical anyway, they have emotions, so to confine the discussion to the material world is only half the debate. You have to engage at a values and philosophical level when talking about a supernatural God. Of course God is going to reveal Himself through a person’s emotions. Every relationship we have has an emotional component. It would reasonable for God to connect that way too?

You have the whole Bible, which faithfully records the MANY times God has established the fact of His existence beyond all doubt, culminating in Jesus. And your response is: “Meh. That’s all fake.”
You also have an entire universe and planet, which are incredibly finely-tuned to allow your existence, establishing the Creator’s existence beyond all doubt. And your response is: “Meh. Obviously, there must be infinite numbers of universes.”
There are PLENTY of hard facts already. You just have your mind made up to reject them, no matter what.

The universe is not fine tuned for life. Nearly all of it is hostile toward life. As to the life on this one small planet, live evolved to fit the environment in which it exists. To say the planet was designed to fit the life within it is like saying that a hole was designed to contain the water in it because the water fits in it so well.

Science basically supports Genesis. The Big Bang = “Let There Be Light.” The description of the order of creation (earth covered with water, then land, then land creatures, etc.) in Genesis is exactly what science now tells us. That couldn’t have been correctly written 6,000+ years ago unless it was the Inspired Word of God.

The big bang does not equal “let there be light” There was no light until sufficient time had passed for cooling so that the simplest elements could form, and then even more time for those elements to be formed into stars. Then billions of years more for the stars to die and explode the heavier elements across the universe. And yet still more time for those elements to form planets. The earth was not covered with water when it first formed. That occurred later.

I do not see why a misdiagnosis by the doctor should be construed as a supernatural miracle.

Is your definition of a miracle something that cannot possible happen without a suspension of natural laws? Or is you definition simply a rare occurrence?

If it is simply a rare occurrence, then how do you determine a normal rare occurrence from a miraculous one?

I also find it telling that the creation of the Bible starts out with light (big bang) and moves from chaos to order, from simple to increasingly complex life forms, culminating with man. It seems an odd fiction for ancient humans to have concocted. To me, that is also a proof.

No, it is the sort of vague statements you would expect from an ancient civilization that thought men could live in the belly of a fish, that serpents can talk, that millions of species could fit onto the ark, and that people rise from the grave.

As to the order of creation are hardly “vague statements.” Here it is verbatim:

1:20] And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.”

[1:21] So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

[1:22] God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”

[1:23] And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

[1:24] And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so.

[1:25] God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

[1:26] Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

[1:27] So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

So, my question is: I have provided you with solid evidence that miracles are still occurring and that the Bible is the Inspired Word of God. Am I wasting my time?

Pierre, the God that is described in the Bible as creator and loving Father. It is the God of the Bible who gives free-will to choose to reject or accept his offer of salvation through Jesus. Jesus said, ‘if you have seen Him, you have seen the Father.’ Therefore, the God of the Bible is seen in the attributes and attitudes of Jesus. He never turned a person away who genuinely came to Him with a need. He displayed kindness, generosity, acceptance, sacrifice and gentleness toward people. He also displayed and taught reverence for God. I understand that the argument goes that others will call God something else, but none compare with the life of Jesus and the offer of forgiveness and life. Do your own comparison and see what you find.

Milton, I’m not sure what you mean by omnibenevolant. I believe He is good as aposed to evil. Again, the gospels reveal in Jesus a God you would want to know. Going back to your first response where you are wanting empirical evidence for God. He says He can be found in creation. I understand your want of material evidence, but God is spiritual, though He made the physical, He will be found in the heart. It’s like standing on earth and saying the lights in the sky are not planets. Creation’s complexity defies logic. It is so magnificent. The interconnedness of the systems reveal design. It’s a person’s presuppositions that determine how they interpret what can be known from the material.

Hi Dan,
Well, omnibenevolent is not really my word, it is a term I have heard used by theists. My understanding is that it means the god is ultimately good, or that he cannot do wrong or commit immoral acts. You might look it up in some theological texts and see if I am on the mark. I’m at work and don’t have to much time at the moment, just firing off an email or two.

last time I had the word used in a reply to me was when someone I asked how they knew god was not actually lying to them all along and Christianity wasn’t some great cosmic joke to him. Of course, you can’t know……how would you test the veracity of a deity? Theists have repeatedly told me themselves that “you cannot know the mind of god”.

As to evidence, it would be hard for me to detail just what it would take for me. My standard answer is that there was an all-knowing creator-god, then he would be well aware of what that evidence would be.

Just because we don’t understand something does not give license to insert a god as a placeholder for actual knowledge.

Hey Milton, trust your work day is going well. I’m at the airport on route to Fiji to meet with friends and do some work in churches there. it’s a bit of a circular argument around inserting God or discounting God. You can do either according to you presuppositions. I understand that you want to be convinced by scientific evidence that God exists. You set the parameters by which you will respond to God. That’s fine – you wont be convinced that way until something happens at a spiritual and emotional level. Sarah’s testimony is about what science says about people’s value; she was disturbed by one of the premier philosophers of our day. His explanation of the value of the person was rooted in science and secular thought and it produced a devaluation of life. Unless there is a net worth on a material evaluation, then a life is not worth supporting. The message of Jesus, as described by Paul, is that ‘faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.’ Science has little to say about this because it goes beyond the material. If you look for God, you will find Him and your life won’t be the same again. Then the creation you want to use to prove or disprove God will become even more amazing than it is to you right now. Have a great day.

It all starts earlier than you say: in childhood, where a secular culture misrepresents the evidence that’s available, particularly in public sector schools – which lean to the left, to put it mildly. Having an atheistic mindset imbued from childhood and then living in a society that reinforces that philosophy means you can go through life never having to wrestle in the least over values, beliefs, etc. If one ever does truly consider the evidence, the atheistic philosophy becomes untenable, to the point of embarrassment at failing to see its obvious illogicality.

Assuming some commonality and constancy to atheistic ideology, two big examples: Big Bang and evolution.

The first is supposedly the event at which nature came into being and all events have causes, ergo there is a supernatural force beyond our observation that is capable of creating a universe and everything in it – including you and me, obviously.

The second is such manifest nonsense that I’m actually quite embarrassed that I left it for decades to give it the moment’s thought needed to see its silliness – and that’s the information problem. ‘Natural selection’ is a conservative process, not creative; all structures need information for their production and ‘natural selection’ offers no method to create or change the information, instead just ignoring it, though it’s the most important part of the problem. The best suggestion modern evolutionists can come up with is ‘random genetic mutation’, whereby individual DNA molecules change, but even the smallest change – the size of a beak for instance – would require multiple changes in specific locations. The improbability of this is larger than the observable universe and such a rate of random mutation would degrade cells beyond catastrophic way before any useful function arose. And this is without discussing entropy, or the minimum amount of information would have been required to sustain even the simplest early life forms. Evolution’s nonsensical.

Both of these things say atheism’s illogical; what to replace it with is a different question.

Atheism addresses neither the big bang nor evolution. There are atheists who believe one or the other or both, and there are atheists that believe neither. There are Christians that believe one or the other or both, and there are Christians that believe neither.

Athism is the simple rejection of all the various claims of the existence of a deity. There are no other positions necessary to be an atheist.

I personally do believe the evidence supports evolution. I choose to not think that I know more about biology and genetics than tens of thousands of scientists that have degrees in the field and have been actually doing the research all of their lives.

However, again, this not what my atheism is based upon. If evolution was to be shown to be completely false tomorrow, I would still be an atheist for the reason stated above.

Falsifying atheism is not a route to proving a deity.

I do look forward to seeing your paper which refutes the findings of several combined fields of study. There is surely a Nobel Prize waiting for you.

I’m quite aware of the minimal conditions of atheism, but thanks for repeating them. I suggest you reread my post; the first subject in particular shows the logic of supernatural cause to observed existence, and thus the illogicality of atheism. The second likewise, though you may need to ponder its import to fully understand it.

I’d hoped that by explicitly stating that the choice of a more logical explanation is a different question I’d preempt your misunderstanding. I guess not.

As to a Nobel Prize – meh. The cash and the gold would be useful, but being associated with Paul Krugman and Barack Obama would be mortifying. And please reread that sentence if you feel the need to say that the Economics and Peace prizes are distinct from the other prizes. Thanks.

I’m not sure I’ve made the supposition you declare; there is indeed no way to know what is beyond the universe and so, while that might fit “We don’t know”, we can in fact use logic to ascribe some characteristics, if we accept the broad premise of the Big Bang*:

1. It is supernatural. The Big Bang says all time, space and matter came into being in that event, ergo the laws of nature as we understand them originated at that time, and anything that precedes it is outside the laws of nature. Should we ever be able to observe and describe the cause then the laws of nature will expand accordingly. Electromagnetism and relativity’s time-dilation effects might be considered examples where that’s already occurred.

2. It is beyond time. Time itself came into being with the Big Bang. This might be the most difficult aspect to comprehend – I certainly can’t say exactly how that would manifest – but it is also probably the most crucial. I am not making “the mistake of special pleading” – ‘turtles all the way down’ is unnecessary outside the temporal existence.

3. It is unimaginably powerful. It created a universe and everything in it – you, me, the Nobel Peace Prize committee, etc.

4. It has personality. This is my weakest conclusion as it’s an implication from the preceding three, rather than directly from the Big Bang, but there can be no random events without time. It is corroborated though by our own existence; we have personality and can hardly exceed our cause. If you insist our personality is just the result of evo-twaddle, then you’re just downgrading personality, and have a descriptive problem.

So, bearing in mind that this all flows from my description of atheism as illogical, and that I explicitly stated that any replacement is a choice for the individual, then I stand by my case as above. And I wasn’t at all put out by the Nobel jibe by-the-way; I quite like the idea of trolling the King of Sweden actually.

Nemo – atheism doesn’t take a position on the Big Bang or on evolution. It’s limited to not believing a god or gods exist. So I may need to reword my question.

Would you say the position that there is not sufficient evidence that a god exists and/or not believing a god exists is illogical? If so, what is illogical about the lack of sufficient evidence to believe a god exists? And what is illogical about not believing a god exists?

Pierre, I’m well aware of the minimal conditions of atheism, and the analysis I provided was not to disprove non-existent tenets of atheistic beliefs, but to use the logic of the arguments themselves to show the illogicality of atheism. For instance, I used the Big Bang as it’s the most widely-accepted theory among astronomers to the binary question of whether the universe is timeless or has an age. Einstein himself invented a ‘cosmological constant’ merely to avoid his own conclusion that the universe had a beginning – you can decide for yourself why – only to describe it as his “biggest blunder” when Hubble produced observational data of the universe’s expansion. If the universe is static then the points I made fall away and atheism is much more tenable, but it would fly in the face of all the data and science, and I can’t see how that’s any more logical.

You’re also, perhaps, over-stressing the word ‘god’; atheism’s claim that there is no god is essentially a claim of constraining one’s beliefs to that which is observable; I contend that I’ve already demonstrated that the logical implication of Hubble, Einstein, etc. is that there is a supernatural force beyond our ability to observe and thus to hold otherwise is illogical. I explicitly said it was another question – for the individual – as to what alternative is better. I hold that I’ve presented very strong logic as to the existence of a supernatural force, beyond space and time, and powerful enough to create a universe, and all that’s in it – including humans with their consciousness.

It’s up to you what you do with that conclusion, but feel free to discuss the alternatives at any future date.

I ask for a more intelligent response, you give me the opposite. The subject is the illogicality of atheism; if you’re now invoking the behaviour of the being you say doesn’t exist to rationalise your non-belief then you’ve gone beyond illogical and are into plain idiocy. Dial it back or don’t bother at all.

Pierre, you have a peculiar notion of fair – very, even. First, your question has no relevance to the subject of atheism and is thus obtuse. Second, it presupposes that those being killed are ‘innocent’, and so is a loaded question – the opposite of what’s usually meant by ‘fair’.

But one subject at a time: when I get a logical response to the subject of atheism, then we can move on to the subject of free will.

You really don’t know you’re doing it, do you? You change killing to rape, and innocence to “deserving” – to be brutally raped, no less. You baldly assert that a YouTube is “very unbiased” – a very peculiar formation, and of questionable accuracy. You question my honesty with “if”; you think I’d have reason to be anything other than honest – with you?

As to the relevance of your question: state it up front. I’m not your dog to be sent down rabbit holes on command.

Your repeated avoidance of the question strongly suggests you are in a state of cognitive dissonance. Until you can give me a reason to believe otherwise, I will be ignoring your posts. One last chance: What do you suppose is the reason God doesn’t prevent ISIS terrorists from killing innocent civilians?

Oh, and as to my asking you about atheism, what on earth makes you think you’re any more knowledgeable on the subject than I am? You’re so blinded by your own assumptions?

Instead, I’ll give you a little insight on the matter: the worst thing about being an atheist is being associated with complacent dullards, who obviously don’t actually think for themselves, but rely on rote talking points and misplaced self-regard. And yes: I am alluding to you.

Atheism may not “pertain” to the Big Bang or evolution, but the Big Bang certainly pertains to atheism. Or you can argue against the observed data suggesting that the universe had a beginning in order to provide a base of logic for atheism; good luck with that.

So “Atheism is merely the lack of belief that a god or gods exist”? It’s just a blank space in the mind? Atheists can argue on the matter without in fact having any opinion on it? This is absurd: you don’t even have the logical constancy or courage of your convictions to say ‘I see insufficient evidence of its existence therefore it doesn’t exist’. Instead you resort to arguing about how many angels (in which you lack belief) can dance on the head of a pin (in which you lack belief). Stop it, for your own sake.

Atheism is a blank space in the mind just as not believing the tooth fairy exists is a blank space in the mind. Think about some of the things you don’t believe to exist – they may be things like dragons, unicorns, Bigfoot, Zeus, leprechauns, etc. Are you able to argue on the matter of these things not existing without having any opinion on it?

“This is absurd: you don’t even have the logical constancy or courage of your convictions to say ‘I see insufficient evidence of its existence therefore it doesn’t exist’.”

That depends on the attributes of the god which is posited. If one posits a god which can’t be disproven, then I wouldn’t go so far. But if one posits a god which can easily be proven to not exist (e.g. an OOO god), then I would go that far and claim I know with 100% certainty that such a god doesn’t exist.

You’re not getting any better: this is not a matter of the attributes of the thing, but whether the thing exists. The tooth fairy is not a blank space in my mind – I have no evidence of it, it does not exist to me. You refuse to be as definite regarding atheism, instead saying that it is the opinion itself that does not exist – which you’ve deployed to shield atheism from facts and logic itself.

Then your list: to history they’re dragons; to science they’re dinosaurs; to news they’re ‘giant lizards’:

Well, children are born without any notion of a god at all, so technically they are atheists until they are imtroduced to the notion of god favored by the society in which they live. True, they have not made a conscious decision that they don’t believe, because they cannot evaluate the strength of the arguments. But still, the notion of a Christian style god is not in their heads at birth. That is why the religion you will most likely embrace is an accident of birth. If you live in a country where
Christianity is the dominant religion, you will most likely be Christian. Likewise for Hinduism, Islamism, and all the other “isms”.

It is not the responsibility of schools to impart Christian notions of a god any more than they should impart the belief in the Hindu gods. Religion has no place in public institutions. If they were to attempt it, where would they find the time to teach all the various religions, let alone the thousands of versions of Christianity. My guess is you only want them to teach what you personally believe.

What evidence do you have of the notions with which children are born? Do you think humans are born as completely blank slates, with no psyche whatsoever – no instinct? I have no idea what a “Christian style god” is, but I’d agree if you said they’re not born with a knowledge of scriptures and the address of their nearest church, though it’s irrelevant anyway: atheism, we’re told, is not believing in any god(s), and thus its proliferation would suppress any innate spirituality – if there is such a thing. Your point about the religion you follow being an accident of birth is not absurd, but it is irrelevant, suggests religions are equally (un)reasonable, and is slightly comical in the comments thread of an article by a former atheist about their adoption of Christianity.

Your guess about what I want taught in schools is even more laughable; I don’t think it’s a school’s place to address these subjects at all, and think everyone would benefit – daycare issues notwithstanding – if schools stuck to basics of reading, writing, languages and science – counting mathematics as the acme of science. Evolution would thus be excluded, as it’s merely doctrinaire drivel – and that’s what I meant in my original post about misrepresenting the evidence. I have no wish to force my beliefs on anyone – can you honestly say the same?

I do not think children are born to believe in a particular god or any god at all because I have seen no evidence to suggest that is the case.

If I misrepresented your opinion about public education, I readily apologize. I was drawing conclusions from your previous post.

Evolution is supported by many years of research in several branches of science. I do not know of any creationist or intelligent design theory which takes into account all of the 200 some odd years of accumulated evidence and does justice to it all. In fact, They have no cohesive theory at all in the scientific sense of the word. I stand ready to be proved wrong, however.

Generally, creationist/intelligent design proponents spend their time trying to attack evolution instead of doing their research and putting out their own theory to recieve scientific scrutiny. If evolution were disproved tomorrow, there would still be no proof of intelligent design.

Your faith in evolution is touching, if misplaced. Rather than simply believing the orthodoxy as it’s handed to you, why don’t you address the core issue of the creation of information that I briefly discussed in my earlier post? Are you comfortable with the enormous odds involved in evolution via random genetic mutation – not just the ‘hits’ but the accompanying deleterious effects and absolutely staggering number of ‘misses’? How about the minimum amount of information required to build even the smallest single-celled life form – did it all come into being at once, randomly created in a functioning order? Bear in mind that even for virus quasi-lifeforms:

The smallest viral genomes – the ssDNA circoviruses, family Circoviridae – code for only two proteins and have a genome size of only two kilobases…

Evolution is nonsense; it’s the backward-facing template for climate science – adopted because of the benefits it brings and as a sign of one’s creed rather than for any actual scientific strength. It’s a massive house of cards built on assumption after assumption, and has only survived as long as it has precisely because it’s not scientific. It can’t be lab-tested, reproduced or falsified; it has corrupted science to such an extent that the climate scam may just apply the coup de grace to its weakened corpse. And that should worry all good people, religious or not.

Evolution is the basis of modern biology and geology, and very important in modern medicine. When you get an infection, do you accept the antibiotic of several years ago? Today’s viruses have become resistant to it, by – evolution.

Evolution may be accepted and shoe-horned into biology and geology, but it makes very little difference to the practical application of either; if anything, it’s deleterious to those things. Doctors and oilmen don’t really care about prehistory when they’re setting bones or drilling wells, but the example of antibiotic resistance that you so badly mangle was made worse by evolutionary assumptions.

Bacterial strains that display antibiotic resistance are in fact the opposite of evolution: they’re mutants that are actually less capable than their original strains and only survive because their fitter relatives are killed by the antibiotics. Evolutionary thinking actually got people killed as years were wasted in some futile arms race before the simple solution was adopted: get recovering patients out of hospital as quickly as possible, where the mutant strains aren’t equipped to survive and naturally die off. I’d recommend you read up on it but, as you don’t even know the difference between virus and bacteria, it’d be way over your head.

Evolution is exactly what happens when bacteria become antibiotic resistant. The antibiotic kills the weaker, the stronger survive and become the dominant strain by simple reproduction. No mutation required, but when it happens it may produce both stronger and weaker varieties, when Natural Selection again causes evolution.

I don’t know what makes you think mutant strains of virus have a particular affinity for hospitals. Getting patients out of hospitals is a good thing because they are full of sick people with other strains of bacteria and virus.

Wow: you actually manage to get evolution completely the wrong way round, saying “No mutation required” and “Natural Selection again causes evolution.” The difference between say, a bacterium and a human being is entirely down to the information it contains – DNA and RNA to the best of our knowledge – a point that you’ve steadfastly ignored; it is that information that dictates what form the organism will take, and how that organism will reproduce itself. Far from ‘causing’ evolution, natural selection merely propagates changes as they occur, and the cause of those changes is the greatest problem facing evolutionary biologists today – random genetic mutation being the leading contender for a solution, though the odds are horrendously stacked against it.

Meanwhile, I didn’t say “mutant strains of viruses have a particular affinity for hospitals” and your resort to straw-man argument shows your failure. Meanwhile, saying that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are stronger than their normal kind is like saying cripples and the blind are the strongest humans because they rarely die in battles. You’re both ignorant and irrational on this topic; I’d suggest you go away and remedy that, but you’ve just taken four months and come back even dumber than before. I feel very sorry for you.

No, I observe that they have similar characteristics: lack of scientific rigour; adherence by gullible people who think themselves smart by association – yet confuse bacteria and virus; appeals to the authority of a priestly caste by those adherents, rather than actual data or logic; the basis of profound social change resulting in the advance of the cynical and powerful at the expense of the decent and weak. It’s vile, not worrying.

We can be reasonably sure that everything children learn comes in through their senses. Children are however, very inclined to assign mind and intention to inanimate objects (it may be a survival mechanism) and to be comforted by belief in invisible friends. The basis of religion may be innate in that sense.

” Your point about the religion you follow being an accident of birth is
not absurd, but it is irrelevant, suggests religions are equally
(un)reasonable, and is slightly comical in the comments thread of an
article by a former atheist about their adoption of Christianity.”

You think other religions are less reasonable than yours? Have you studied any others? if you talk to educated people of any religion or none, they are able to talk about them reasonably, and, like you, cast out at least some of the unreasonable aspects.

On the contrary, it’s very relevant here:
“One afternoon, I noticed that my usual desk in the college library was in front of the Theology section”
Since Sarah was at Oxford, this meant it happened to be Christian theology. Had she been in Riyadh, it would have been Islamic theology, and had she been in Delhi, Hindu. In each case this article, and its comments, would have been very different.

We can indeed be “reasonably sure that everything children learn comes in through their senses” – because it’s a truism, being pretty much the distinction of ‘learnt’ versus ‘innate’. I’d love to see your evidence of children’s inclination to “assign mind and intention to inanimate objects” – particularly regarding something so subjective as “comforted”. But, whether evolutionary survival instinct or not, an innate basis of religion confirms my point and refutes my correspondent’s that we are born atheistic.

You have no idea whatsoever about my religion and I took pains to address only the illogicality of atheism; frankly, your attempt to turn it in the direction of specific religion is shallow, cliched and wearisome. Historians tell us that Incan religious ceremonies involved ripping the still-beating hearts out of living sacrifices; are you going to argue all religions are equally reasonable?

As to the suggestion that the theology section of an Oxford college library would be exclusively Christian: SMH I believe is the current vernacular when faced with such silliness. You really must try and actually use your brain.

Really – ‘Boopsie’ is your evidence? Yes, I’m being mildly facetious, but I’m not greatly moved by appeals to authority, and almost completely unmoved by subjective articles in a field as subjective as psychology. I’ve known quite a few psychologists and, though one or two have been nice people and even had a modicum of intelligence, I’ve never yet met one I’d consider a first-rate intellect; even you could probably do better thinking for yourself.

As to “what are friends for if not to give comfort?” Why, to give discomfort of course – or would you rate comfort above warning if you think a friend’s heading for disaster? If so, I pity you and your friends.

Now you’re just being silly. Imaginary friends clearly fall into the realm of psychology, and children’s imaginary friends are unlikely to warn them of anything. My point is that children’s comforting imaginary friends grow up to be the ultimate Imaginary Friend, all our sins and griefs to bear.

I asked for evidence, you gave me opinion, and it’s me being silly? I didn’t say that “children’s imaginary friends” wouldn’t come under the heading ‘psychology’, merely that it’s a highly subjective field and I’m unimpressed by the people I’ve met who were drawn to it. Your final point is self-aggrandizing nonsense: that believers in God are really just people who failed to attain true adulthood, and that you are a superior rationalist looking down on them from a position of mature reason; yet your basic errors of comprehension and logic show the exact opposite to be true – unless of course you don’t believe what you write and are merely trolling. Neither position reflects well upon you.

It is you who shows a basic error of comprehension and logic. I did not say “that believers in God are really just people who failed to attain true
adulthood, and that [I am] a superior rationalist looking down on them
from a position of mature reason;”
I said that “children’s comforting imaginary friends grow up to be the ultimate Imaginary Friend” i.e. that as children grow up, their imaginary friend grows more sophisticated along with them – “The Ground of All Being” etc. The difference is that their greater sophistication means they never start thinking S/He is imaginary. (But S/He is.)

As for self-aggrandizing nonsense, I give you “Really – ‘Boopsie’ is your evidence?”

“Historians tell us that Incan religious ceremonies involved ripping the
still-beating hearts out of living sacrifices; are you going to argue
all religions are equally reasonable?”
Jewish religious ceremonies involve cutting the living foreskins off living babies. Some Christian religious ceremonies involve handling snakes, in accordance with biblical teachings (drinking poison, not so much.) Others involve believing that bread and wine actually turn into Jesus’ flesh and blood, which believers eat and drink. I am going to argue that some religions are somewhat more unreasonable than others.

conventional christianity, especially pauline neo-calvinism, REQUIRES the subjection of women. perhaps the pauline ideology breaks its own elbow while patting itself on the back for “saving” gentiles, but it offers NOTHING to africans, european pagans, american pagans or asians. The most exotic foreigners that the bible text appears to know about, are “philistines” which are hebraic for “other” and we do not know their religious, cultural or genetic backgrounds. for all we know, they could have been semitic like samaritans.

whoever it is that pays you, would be better advised to spend their money elsewhere. I did not accuse our “assistant professor” of trashing LGBT agendas. I accused her of claiming that her conversion to christianity as being based on “evidence” yet her prior atheist position appeared to not have been thought out much at all. So this conversion of hers, can hardly be regarded as any kind of evidence of inherent superiority of her new ideology over whatever she might have held-by-default as the old.

@miltonplatt:disqus: You say, “God allows evil; therefore, God is evil.” Your fallacy is that you are insisting that God must prevent SOME evil — the kind that strikes YOU as especially evil. I’m sure you don’t want God to wipe out ALL evil, since then he would be forced to wipe out YOU (not to mention me, and every other human being).
You want God to prevent natural disasters, and get rid of cancer. Why stop there? Shouldn’t God get rid of all pain, all disease, and all death, from whatever cause? What effect would that have on our world?
You want God to prevent child rapists from doing their sinful act. Why stop there? Shouldn’t God prevent EVERY sinful act? What effect would that have?

Your “logical” objection to God is not logical. It is an emotional tantrum, based entirely upon your opinion of acceptable evil vs. unacceptable evil. And it is very, very, very human. I do it too. In fact, it’s even in the Bible, given voice by some of the Bible’s greatest prophets.
God has answers for you. (And me.) The problem is, you don’t want to hear them. Because those answers start with: you are a sinner. YOU are that evil you hate, which you know God ought to destroy.

Wiping out evil is not the same as wiping out individuals. That is a straw man argument.

My objection is not emotional it is logical based upon the very attributes Christians give their own god. Ar you saying that god finds child rape and loss of life thru natural disasters as moral, rather than immoral?

I posit a logical query and the only answer you have is to resort to an ad hominem?

Between me and gpenglase, you have been given a very complete and logical response, and you dismiss it without addressing any of it. Then you simply repeat your original complaint. There was no ad hominem and no straw man. You are desperately tossing around terms that don’t apply as a last-ditch defense of your bad logic.

As I clearly pointed out, your argument is NOT “based upon the very attributes Christians give their own god.” Your argument ignores God’s perfect holiness, which cannot abide ANY sin, and God’s perfect justice, which must punish EVERY sin. Your argument also ignores the Fall and its consequences. You consistently ignore every part of Christian theology that negates your argument. Your false argument will only work on people who mistakenly think the totality of Christian theology is “God is love.” (And even “God is love” they debase into “God is a very powerful and good version of humanity at its best.” That is not at all what Christianity teaches.)

I reread the post I was responding to. I agree, there was no ad hominem. However, it is a strawman argument to say that a god would have to wipe out individuals instead of just wiping out immoral behavior. I never characterized the solution in this manner. It should be perfectly within the scope of an all powerful being’s ability to simply stop the immoral behavior without destroying the individual. People stop the immoral acts of others routinely without killing them.

So you are saying that Christians do not view their god as omnipotent and omnibenevolent? His power and goodness are viewed as limited? Those are the attributes I mention.

Yes, Christians do ascribe other attributes to their god besides those two. It was not necessary to bring them up within the scope of my argument. But since you brought a couple more, I will address them briefly.

As to holiness, he obviously can abide sin, because it has been occuring since there were humans to do it and he has allowed it to continue.

As to justice, I do not find the Christian system just. You can find posts on this very thread where Christians are extolling the necessity of free will as to why evil is allowed to occur. In essence, they are saying that the free will of a rapist trumps the free will of the victim. That can hardly be described as just. Plus, Christians constantly pray to their god for things that would abridge the free will of others. And in the Bible, god did things to abridge free will. For instsnce, why did the Pharoah not let the Jews go? Because god hardened his heart. His free will had been abridged.

Depending upon which Christian one is talking to, of course, god is said to accept repentance at the last minute for a life of horrendous immorality, therefore guaranteeing the person a place in heaven. But without accepting Jesus, one cannot go to neaven. That means Hitler (or the equivalent) can repent and be saved, but his victims will all have gone to hell. Justice?

Then there is the subject of natural disasters, which do not involve the hand of man. Whose free will is being abridged if god stopped a natural disaster?

Also, how do you achieve perfect justice while claiming to be merciful? Mercy involves the suspension of justice. Justice is paying the correct penalty for the crime. Mercy is forgiving the person and lessening or eliminating the punishment for the crime. One can be sometimes just and at other times mercifull, but one cannot be simultaneously perfectly just and perfectly merciful.

The fall was not important to my argument, but again, there are problems with it.

First, Adam and Eve had no concept of what good or evil was before they ate the fruit. Therefore they could not judge that it was bad to eat it. Secondly, based upon the all-knowing attribute, the Christian god would have known in advance what their choice was going to be and the consequences. So it was a set up from the outset. He intended for it to happen.

To get back on point, let me restate my original argument, which contrary to your claim has gone unanswered.

My original argument was that if someone (including a deity) had the power to stop a child from being raped stood by and did nothing and said to the rapist in essence, ” i’ll let you rape the child and punish you later” then that person or deity has commited an immoral act. So a person that actually stops the child from being raped is more moral in this instance than the one who does not stop it.

Sorry if I riled you a bit. These discussions do get emotional at times.

I will try one last time. Your argument hinges entirely on characterizing some sins as unacceptable, and some as acceptable. You claim God is immoral not to stop the rape of a child (and other egregious sins), but don’t have a problem with God allowing people to hate the rapist (and curse the guy who cuts them off in traffic, and push others out of their way, and reject God’s existence, and argue endlessly without listening).

I am saying that if God decided he couldn’t allow the egregious sins then He would also not allow the “little” sins. This is why you can’t just ignore the Fall, as if it has no bearing on your argument.

You can’t excuse Adam & Eve. God said, “Don’t eat that one fruit.” That is all that ought to have been necessary for obedience. But God added a warning also: “In the day you eat of it, dying you will die.” So they had one very simple command, given directly by God, together with a warning of terrible punishment should they disobey. What else do you think they ought to have had, in fairness?

Regarding God’s choice to create mankind, even though He knew ahead of time that they would choose to sin: 1) It was not a setup. Try that argument in any court of law, and see how far it gets you. “Your Honor, the cops knew ahead of time that people go 50 mph in this 30 mph zone. So when they caught me, it was a setup.” Nah. 2) Even so, WHY did God choose to go ahead with mankind, knowing all the horrors that would ensue? Honestly, I don’t know. (And keep in mind, if you and I are horrified at the results of the Fall, imagine the horror of a loving God, who sees ALL of it!) Apparently, a redeemed soul is worth more to God than all those horrors. It boggles my mind, that God would think me worth so much. Also, it is worth mentioning that God promises to make even the worst horrors work out for the good of those who love Him. (As for those who reject God, He is not obligated to work on their behalf, though He often does.) Personally — although I can’t claim any support for this from the Bible — I hope that God will eventually redeem everyone into a loving relationship with Him. But whatever God’s reason for going ahead with creating mankind, that’s not my call. I’m not God.

I appreciate your persistence but we are just talking past each other, it seems.

My argument only address a specific immoral act. The question of whether it is immoral for your god to allow a child rape when he could prevent it is not contingent on any discussion of other major or minor acts. Also, I have made no attempt to characterize one immoral act over another at all. I picked child rape (which does occur) because it is the clearest example to demonstrate my point.

It is a simple yes or no question. Is it a moral act to allow a child to be raped if you have the power to easily stop it, but you choose not to? And does this morality not apply to your deity?

I personally believe that to be immoral and I am asking you to tell me if you think it is immoral or moral. There are only those two choices. If you think it is moral for your god to allow it, then argue that position. If you think it is immoral, then we agree, but it puts your god in the position of committing an immoral act.

Your court of law example is a false equivalence. The speeder knew right from wrong before he sped. Adam and Eve did not know right from wrong until after they ate the fruit. Without that knowledge, all choices would have seemed equally valid. An equivalent would be the driver who drove at 50 because there were no signs on any highways anywhere to set the speed limit and there was virtually no knowledge available in the world to differentiate right from wrong. it was virtually impossible for the speeder to know right from wrong. I am certain the judge would dismiss the case. Also, to be equivalent, the judge would have to be the only being on earth who knew right from wrong.

Plus my argument was not that the creation of man was a setup. I said the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a setup because god knew what was going to happen. Are you saying that god was unaware of the future consequences of his action?

Off the main topic, so replied to separately: “…why did the Pharoah not let the Jews go? Because god hardened his heart. His free will had been abridged.”
Re-read the passage. First it says, “Pharaoh hardened his heart, and would not let them go.” Free will. Next it says, “Pharaoh would not let them go, because his heart was hardened.” Natural consequence of sin. Finally it says, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so he would not let them go [even though any reasonable person would have given in].” Direct judgment of God. No more free will, just like you’re demanding.

Yes, that is correct. It is a demonstration that god can and does interfere with free will. Exactly my point. Thanks. It shows that the excuse that stopping evil will abridge someone’s free will is a hollow excuse. Free will is not inviolable by biblical standards.

Again, DMM, i have enjoyed the give and take with you. I do sometimes get pointed, but never intend to offend. I believe religious beliefs should be open to the same questioning as everything else in life.

perhaps, but there is NO EXPLANATION about why God intervenes/interferes in ONE case and oddly not in another. If evil/sin is unacceptable to God, and God possesses the ability to destroy it (not matter HOW, possibly including the destruction of all of humanity, whatever)…and God FAILS TO DO THIS, my sympathy for this God, is kind of limited. And my adoration, SEVERELY so.

so the obvious question is whether “pharoah” hardened his OWN heart or whether God did it. If God has unlimited power, and unlimited knowledge, and humans do not (that would include pharoah) then it is God’s doing, and whatever further suffering is visited upon the jews as well as the egyptian subjects, are all acts of God.
So God is still accountable.

if God cannot abide any sin, yet sin still exists, that is God’s failure, not ours. That is inescapable logic, especially if you ascribe to a neo-Calvinist worldview. You cannot blame your creations for being defective, if you DESIGNED them to be defective.

Forgot to address “Wiping out evil is not the same as wiping out individuals.”

Given: A planet is full of evil people who continually do evil, in intent, thought, word, and deed. (n.b. I’m not claiming that these evil people never do anything good.)
Given: One desires to entirely stop the evil people from being and doing evil.
Choices: Either a) Change them entirely from within to make them entirely good; or b) Destroy them.
Further Given: One wishes not to destroy them. That leaves choice a).
Choices: Either a1) Change them against their will; or b1) Change them with their agreement and cooperation.
If a1, then one now has a planet full of robots or zombies or something. The individuals have been preserved, in a manner of speaking, but their individuality has effectively been destroyed. This is a common theme in sci-fi, and is always considered to be a horror, something to which death is preferable.
That leaves choice a2, which leads directly to The Gospel.

“Given: One desires to entirely stop the evil people from being and doing evil.”

no, in the conventional christian ideology, it is not “one” who allegedly does this, it is “GOD” who allegedly DESIRES to do this.
Why God FAILS to therefore do it, is the part that the popular ideology, totally fails to explain. And instead, offers pretty lame excuses. Which tend to blame the humans. See the above arguments about that. God is accountable, if the rest of the “premises” are still held about the nature of God and the nature of man.

To add to this, Milton Platt: the story in Genesis puts forward a God that created a perfect world which was then corrupted by man’s sin. To answer those that would say that God created sin, it is possible for perfection to exist without the sin and for love to exist without hate. So it was man’s rebellion against the perfect God and his perfect creation (sin) that then brought that perfection down, over the millenia, to the point that the world groans under the weight of sin that it now carries. Sin leads to death (it is clearly and unmistakenly demonstrated with society every day) and all around us is death and the culture of death – not God’s intention not His design, and not His balance.

So you wish to blame the God who created perfection for the actions of his creation (to which he gave free will to choose life or death, to choose love or hate, who have rebelled against him? You want your free will and yet you argue for a robotic world within which there is no choice to act, and then you blame Him for our rebellious actions? Or is it that you want a perfect God, who see all sin as abhorrent, to stop some sin and not some other, to act as a partial judge – that is not His nature. So He provides a way for us to be reconciled with Him, which you reject because of your own rebellion and yet it’s His fault when you don’t accept this, and he is supposed to protect you from the evil within your own heart and the evil within the hearts of others, all the while denying His existence and His authority to rule?

nope, if God created humans with those inherent defects (among which, are the tendency to bite the hand that feeds them) then God is accountable for creating them that way. They CANNOT be held accountable for being only as “He” created them, since they do NOT possess unlimited knowledge and power. Power corrupts, and absolute power not only corrupts absolutely, but also is the singular place where accountability lies, and fails.

no, the argument goes more like this:
if god has unlimited power and knowledge, and evil STILL EXISTS and moreover VICTIMIZES HUMANS, then it does follow that god has failed to protect his charges (you know, the ones he designed intentionally with defects, so they are unable to protect THEMSELVES…)

so yeah, following that ideology to its logical conclusion, God is at fault, or God’s power is NOT unlimited. Take your pick.

God has DECLINED (not “failed”) to protect his CREATURES (not “charges”) from the warned-about consequences of their own choices to disobey Him. And He did not design humans with defects. We live now in a fallen world, so you cannot take current defects as evidence of an intentionally-defective design. The world in which we live, which is incredibly amazing and also screwed-up, is exactly what one would expect from the Biblical narrative. Saying God is “at fault” is like saying a parent is “at fault” for a child being punished for disobedience. It’s like saying the government is “at fault” for creating widows and orphans when it executes murderers. It’s like saying the teacher is “at fault” when she fails a student who refused to do the assigned work. It’s like saying the referee is “at fault” for a team losing a game, because the referee penalized them for breaking the rules.

fine, you say “declined” and I say FAILED. Either way, God had the means and the ability to create a better outcome and did not.
I cannot see this as a failing of the humans, whose abilities and ken are obviously limited. I must place the blame upon the superhuman entity indicated in the narrative.

With regard to “…And He did not design humans with defects…” I must strongly disagree. All of the failings attributed to humans (especially eve’s supposed vulnerability to talking snakes) are ones that the humans DID NOT CHOOSE but were rather created with. Humans are indicated as being subordinate to God-the-creator. There is no other way to interpret this story as far as I can see it. The humans were even chastised for wanting to go outside the “garden” even when they had no idea what lay without.

WRT “…Saying God is “at fault” is like saying a parent is “at fault” for a child being punished for disobedience…”

no, if I asserted that statement, I would have made that statement.
I have a problem with your metaphor since it is NOT apt. A parent is CLEARLY AT FAULT FOR EXCESSIVELY PUNISHING a child for “disobedience”, if that child cannot possibly be aware of the nature of the offense, the gravity of it, the nature of punishment, nor the implied linkage between the punishment and the offense.

Further, God-the-creator is not the same entity as a mortal, human, parent. God-the-creator, is popularly presumed to be possessed of unlimited power, knowledge, and presence. Therefore, presuming humans do NOT have those powers, ALL OUTCOMES ARE GOD’S FAULT. That last conclusion is inescapable, unless you assert that there are other gods with equal powers.

The same specious arguments apply to your other false-equivalencies. Governments and teachers and game referees, are all mortals. God-the-creator is presumed to NOT be, so it is appropriate to judge the actions (and in-actions) of this god, by a different standard.

It is one thing to like the philosophy of Christianity, and it is another to go and plunge yourself into the idea that everything in the Bible is true. Any atheist can use inspiration from any sacred texts of any culture that has ever existed, but that doesn’t mean they have to stop being atheists just because they agree with one of the 10 commandments. The fact that the supposed infallible word of god can be twisted, misinterpreted, faked and argued over even among its believers, is very telling of the possibility that maybe it wasn’t the word of god to begin with. I mean, why was god so blunt and bold with his manifestations to humans thousands of years ago, and now so shy about it. Why didn’t he use a diamond tablet to give the commandments to Moses, or why didn’t Jesus wrote the bible again with an ink that couldn’t be erased in a paper that couldn’t be destroyed. That doesn’t take away free will, but its easier to argue over the existence of a piece of paper that hasn’t aged in 2000 years than it is to argue over who said what , when, and why in a scenario where we don´t know the mental health of the witnesses. And by the way, god is already supposedly talking personally to people in a way that no one else hears the conversation, thats even worse than appearing to everyone at once and setting everything straight from the get go.

This story made me weep…it is so hard for the talented, smart and gifted to see the Lord for who he is…those of us struggling not to drown in muck at the bottom have less to let go of and/or to prop us up…good for the author

Well the improbable occurred then – by your reckoning. I’m more puzzled why you even asked the question; though I might not agree with the result of ANOTHER change of mind, in the absence of evidence otherwise I’d assume it to be from intellect and honesty.

the law of probability that you yourself appear to be using: if it happened before, it is more likely to happen again, than if it was never known to have happened at all.

And about “evidence…” if she regards the bible as “evidence” of much of anything, she will apparently believe anything she reads. The vast majority of direct or implied “claims” in the KJV, are not verifiable and can NOT be regarded as “evidence” in a court of law. I grant that in past times, it was regarded as such, but those times are PAST and appropriately so.

therefore, applying the “probability” law described above, if she changed her mind ONCE, the smart money is on her changing it again. whether that amounts to a wholesale rejection of an entire mountain of ideological-packaging or just PARTS of it, is anyone’s guess.

As a side note, I find the idolatry of “well, the bible says it so that must be the truth”…coupled with the notion of packaged-marketing, wherein a “believer” is somehow expected to “just believe all of it, regardless of how much has actually been examined”, to be indicative of people who are mentally lazy.
Instead of doing the heavy lifting, they presume to “trust” the ideology of complete strangers, from the undocumented past, who obviously had a wide variety of motives for whatever they read or taught. Some of those motives might have been worth of admiration. Others rather clearly were not.

Do yourself a favour and just stop: you still don’t seem to grasp that I was talking about the probability of something being obvious if someone feels the need to state it, not that of changing her mind – which I’d explicitly acknowledged at the very beginning.

Your understanding of probability is awry too: in probability calculation past occurrence has no bearing on future events; thus, if I toss a coin five times and each one is heads, the next toss will still be 50:50 heads/tails. Like I said, I’d love to see your method for your ‘obviously/has to be stated’ probability function.

The rest of your post is invented quotes of straw men; I’ve never heard anyone claim any of those things, but they are familiar from any number of half-wit atheists who’ve somehow managed to convince themselves that besting a monster of their own imagination is a sign of intellectual prowess. Good luck with that, though it seems you’re the one being “mentally lazy”. You even manage to call the past “undocumented” in a discussion of the Bible!

however laws of probability also apply to predicting a SEQUENTIAL SET of repeated events. the probability of two “heads” flips in a row, is less than 50-50. and THREE heads in a row is much less and so on. So it is not correct to claim that probability has no concept of past occurrence. if we presume that time is linear, and “three heads” could be either sequential flips or simultaneous flips with three coins at a time, probably still applies to those outcomes.

Wow: now you’re blundering on chronology. You’re right that the chance of two ‘heads’ in a row is less than 50:50 – it’s 25:75, just the same as it is for two tails, a head & tail or a tail & head; for three ‘heads’ it’s 1:7, etc. This is the probability before the first toss. However, the first toss is irrelevant once it’s happened, and the probability for the second toss is 50:50. “Past occurrence” is just that: past. So, yet again, if I toss five heads in sequence, it doesn’t matter: the sixth toss is still 50:50. You really need to keep your efforts a little nearer the limits of your intellect.

IMHO it was about you “accepting…” her possible re-change-of-mind, rather your implication that such further change WOULD NOT be “driven” by “intellect and honesty” but by something pernicious and containing saturated fats.

Where do you get this nonsense? I’m sorry, but you really do seem to be missing some basic logic: ‘intellect’ is objective – it exists, and is the collective noun for just about all the nonphysical aspects of being human; if I qualified ‘intellect’ with adjectives such as ‘strong’ or ‘poor’, then I’d be subjective. ‘Honesty’ is assumed because without it there’d be little point reading it. This is what should have been obvious to you.

Just to remind you what I said upthread and 5 months ago:

“though I might not agree with the result of ANOTHER change of mind, in the absence of evidence otherwise I’d assume it to be from intellect and honesty.”

okay, maybe so, but you also asserted that the CURRENT “belief” or “decision” she appears to have reached, was based upon “evidence” and further that if she were to change her mind again, there would be some kind of evaluation of “evidence” on your part.

I just question where this alleged “evidence” supposedly came from in the first place. I have already asserted that the KJV is not admissible “evidence” in a court of law. It is strictly hearsay, and from essentially anonymous sources. It cannot be cross-examined, hence it is not admissible evidence. Nor, I must further assert, is it PROOF of anything.

OK, explaining basic logic to you is getting too tedious so, briefly, her reformation was explicitly the result of interaction with the evidence and I’d anticipate that if she were to change again it would be for the same reason. Whether I’d agree with any further change is unknown because we’re dealing with an entirely hypothetical situation.

I have no idea why you reduce evidence to the Bible, given all the evidence of geology, paleontology, cosmology, etc, but even so you’re wrong: the Bible is evidence and was used in court in England just a few years ago to convict someone for reading from it. Even without that, it would still be evidence of language and writing, and the contents are evidence on their own. You really do seem to have a problem separating the objective from the subjective; what is from what you’d like to be.

End: the Bible is by a massive factor the most authenticated and reliable ancient manuscript on the planet. How you choose to view the contents is entirely your own affair, but for your own sake you really need to educate yourself on these basic facts.

perhaps we are rather beating a dead horse (to use an american expression, but even brits have probably a concept of a dead horse as well).
But it goes like this: In US jurisprudence, the bible is NOT admissible as evidence of some establishment of fact. We got done arguing about that, around 100 years ago. If in the UK they are still “trying” cases about that, I would have some issues with paying my taxes to a government which wastes them in that manner. I would however admit that governmental units in the USA have probably wasted tax money for worse reasons than that. In the Constitution, there are provisions that explicitly forbid the creation of laws that concern practice of religion; for around 1000 years, the contrary was the case in England if not the UK.

I still question how you arrive at the claim that the “bible is…most authenticated and reliable ancient manuscript on the planet” when it appears to make claims like the following:
1) the earth, sun and all of the stars, were created by a single individual, in a week.
2) women are the possession of their fathers or brothers or husbands
3) women are not entitled to make their own decisions about whom to marry or whom to have sex with, and
4) sex is for procreation, so a “barren” woman is not valuable.
5) a guy popularly called “jeezus” (whose real name was probably someting like yeshua),
who apparent was a real person, a devout jew, rabbi, and probably associated with a movement called the “essenes”, was God incarnate.
6) this god-man was sent to earth to redeem humanity who were created with some rather serious defects by a supernatural being who condemns them to eternal punishment for being defective
7) that “god” is rather self-righteous and egotistical, as well as possessed of unlimited power and knowledge, but despite that, REQUIRES adoration from the defective humans that “he” created.
8) regardless of what we do while living on earth as humans, we must BELIEVE certain things, apparently to please this rather dysfunctional god. One of those required beliefs, is that the “jeezus” character is some kind of super-human, and he was born of a human who was also superhuman but she was a woman so only catholics pray to her.

So this is what you call “reliable manuscript” notwithstanding that it is neither reliable nor a manuscript.

Subjectivity and straw-men, again: I talked of “intellect and honesty” as default assumptions, and you add “legitimately”; show me where I said that. Or “a fetid mass of parrot droppings” for that matter. Or even that she AGREES with me.

i tend to use quotes to refer to phrases that someone ELSE said. In your case I use “legitimately” in reference to your unfounded claims that the bible is somehow uniquely verifiable and unsullied in its integrity. By self-identifying as having ascribed to a similar belief system, our aussie assistant-professor does imply agreeing with you, typically upon the most fantastic of the claims that I had just described.

I find those claims neither believable nor verifiable nor legitimate; after quite some consideration of the archaeological finds of that period, I am inclined to summarily reject most of the popular apologist assertions about yeshua. Some however do appear to have external cultural relevance to events described in arguably-more-reliable texts that apparently you are not familiar with. Among those are the writings of “Pliny the Younger” who was at least somewhat familiar with the “christian” movement and possibly the essenes as well, as a prominent period roman official.

Not only do I not buy the notion that yeshua is/was/god/yahweh/elohim, I do not buy the notion that he said he was nor thought he was. The most convincing evidence for that analysis is that the text of the KJV still quotes him (?) as referring to yahweh as “my father” rather consistently.

No one that I know of, refers to himself in the third person case. And even then, as I have already said, I am far from convinced that the “quotes” are genuine in the first place. All I can go on, is how often the phrase “my father” appears in the text, even if it is not original.

The extant judaic culture of today, as well as the common-era-jewish-roman culture, would have regarded such a claim as both blasphemy and treasonous. Not only would yeshua not have made such a claim, anyone who DID so, would have been subject to execution by BOTH governmental systems of common-era-judea.

Conversely as you may recall, pilate said that he “found no fault in this man” according to the story. The roman government had no reason to want him dead. I think he was killed by the JEWISH priest class because his teaching was considered a threat to their power. It wasn’t because he was god, but it did suit their purposes to claim that he said he was yahweh, since circulation of such rumors, would buy his rivals some popular support for executing him.

I do somewhat hold yeshua accountable for failing to even speak in his own defense (a failure of others likewise, including socrates and ghandi) but that does not really support the rather specious notion that by his death, he would magically “redeem” humanity. Two other men allegedly died alongside him, according to the story, and they suffered just as much as he did. Their deaths did not redeem anyone either. THAT set of claims, was invented much later and added to the text.

never mind that “intellect and honesty” would normally be found with the PRESENCE of evidence, rather than the absence of it. In the latter case, I would use the term “conjecture” for the formation of a hypothesis, and use the term “fantasy” for the world of tightly-held-conclusions DESPITE the lack of any data or traceable logic, to support them.

You really do seem to have a reading comprehension problem – and a sad need to tell me. The “absence of evidence otherwise” of which I wrote was mine in regards to dishonesty in changing her mind; it had nothing to do with the evidence she relied on. Learn to read.

why would “changing her mind” be dishonest? Obviously she “changed her mind” once before, and the xtians here, seemed to adore that, yet express no admiration for her prior views, nor entertain the very real possibility that she could “change her mind” again.
And you are right about one thing: there is no evidence so far, that she has bothered to actually participate in this discussion (such as it is). Maybe she finds it distasteful. Maybe she simply is unaware that it is taking place. I do not claim to know.

I have no idea why anyone changes their opinion which is why, unless evidenced otherwise, I assume such changes to be honest; unless you contend there’s never been a dishonest opinion expressed then your question is as redundant as it is silly. You really do need to discipline your thought processes: instead of sticking to the plain text of the original comment you resort to make-believe of “context” and complain that “She is going to encounter a lot of hostility” somehow isn’t “explicit” enough for you; that the author of the article not condescending to enjoy the honour of your correspondence; and that “xtians” – whatever they are – haven’t fulminated to your satisfaction on her previous views. I sincerely suggest that you wean yourself off fanciful notions of what you feel ought to be and instead focus on what actually is – and do so as a general principle.

never mind that in american english, proper nouns are only capitalized with the FIRST LETTER. We have no “diction” standard for “all caps” nor for wordS that end in capitaL letterS eitheR. So I shall use them stylistically as I choose, and if that keeps you up late at night, try less caffeine.

Why would she change her mind again? It seems like she put a lot of time and research into investigating Christianity and then became a believer. When she was an atheist, she never really looked into Christianity, but rather believed in false teachings about the faith.

From what she said in the article- “In the Summer of 2008, I began a new job as Assistant Professor at Florida State University, where I continued my research examining the relationship between the history of science, Christianity, and political thought…
A friend gave me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and one night, after a couple months of attending church, I knelt in my closet in my apartment and asked Jesus to save me, and to become the Lord of my life.
From there, I started a rigorous diet of theology, reading the Bible and exploring theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and F.D. Maurice.”

She read about Christianity both before and after becoming a believer and she still is one today. She also went on to say that her views of God and Heaven were, as an atheist, not at all in agreement with what the Bible actually teaches.

that is all very nice, but she oddly LEAVES OUT whatever those “…views…as an atheist…” were. She does state that they are “not at all in agreement…” but she fails to actually state WHAT she has concluded that the “bible actually teaches” about God and Heaven. My recollection is that, at very least, the images implied are QUITE DIFFERENT between the OT and the NT. I would think that a book (or a compliation, more properly, of books) if WRITTEN BY GOD or “Divinely Inspired” by some superhuman intelligence possessed of unlimited power and knowledge, would have done a better job of writing it, and not needed to “write another one later” to either clarify or controvert the prior one.
But maybe none of those issues bother her. They do bother me.
And regarding C.S.Lewis, some of them did bother him. But instead of actually investigating those inconsistencies, he came up with lame excuses for them.

and if anyone detects “hostility” in my tone, it may well be there. Miguel Serveto was an early unitarian theologian as well as a fairly accomplished scientist in matters related to the practice of medicine. He was an arguable prophet of my faith. His execution was approved by John Calvin, the same wonderful character for whom “calvinism” is named.

Perhaps in her findings of historical value is the evidence for the life, death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is what Christianity is based upon. Not upon how bad churches or individual Christians have acted throughout the years. Are such things troubling? Of course. But they do not in and of themselves undermine the validity of the religion.

Okay, I’ll bite. Let’s talk about the “resurrection of Jesus Christ”.
As though there were “evidence” that were somehow admissible, to support or refute the notion of the above, since (as you say) this “event” is what christianity is based upon. All we can go on, are the extant “narratives” and some of the more-or-less-known surrounding details:

1) I doubt that originally, nascent christianity was based upon the “death-and-resurrection”, concept since in the very early ministry, yeshua WAS NOT DEAD. I will grant that “christian” was probably not a popular term among his followers. Instead, I submit that it was probably called “the way” or some hebrew equivalent (which is why “I am the way, the truth and the life…” is now a misquoted confusion of what he actually said in the first place). Remember, the term “christos” is GREEK, not hebrew/aramaic, so his own people would NOT have called him by a greek term. Only the wealthy and educated, would have even spoken greek (such as pilate and possibly matthew-a government employee) but certainly NOT the rest of the apostles.

2) from what I can gather from the ongoing “the way” ministry among the remaining apostles after yeshua’s execution, the notion of his impending return from the dead, was invented sometime LATER, at least some years after the execution.
Shortly after, yeshua’s brother, James the Just, appears to have been something of a rival to Simon-Peter (who otherwise appeared to be the emerging second-string-leader of “the way” ministry) and somewhere after the shake-out between them (in which Simon Peter more or less won) it is possible that those who chose to follow James the Just, instead wished for yeshua himself to return, and from THAT idea, wishes became “predictions” or whatever.

3) the “accounts” of the resurrection are VERY PROBLEMATIC. For example, the “two marys” who allegedly went to the tomb, found it empty. The story somehow asserts that “no man could have opened it” notwithstanding the fact that about three days earlier, MEN SEALED IT. so the “opening” itself is NEVER ACCOUNTED FOR, so the popular excuse is that it was magical.
Also problematic is the assertion that the “marys” went to the tomb for the purpose of preparing yeshua’s body with expensive oils or spices (presumably to preserve it) but the story had already established that THE TOMB WAS SEALED. How did the women presume to attend to his remains if they could not have gotten into the tomb? This JUST ONE of MANY problems with an story/legend that lacks a credible timeline.
The story also asserts that “a young man” sat outside the tomb, and told the women that yeshua was gone. This young man was not familiar to the women. The story sometimes is claimed to have said that the “young man” was an “angel” but nowhere does it explain how the women would have known this.

4) it is also problematic generally that the above details are provided by women, since women were not allowed to provide testimony (and “testify” is based upon the root “testis” which literally meant that if here were suspected of lying, someone could squeeze a witness’ balls to get him to fess up). Hence EVEN IN THE CONTEXT OF THAT CULTURE, a woman could not be trusted to provide factual evidence. And the “young man” was never further questioned by anyone, even though HE could have provided reliable testimony. And what he told the “marys” was self-evident anyway, since the narrative says that they looked inside and saw that he was gone. The USEFUL THING that this “angel” could have said to them, was whether or why the tomb had been unsealed. But I digress.

5) further narrative, related to the “return to earth” suggests that yeshua re-appeared sometime later among un-named people. It is unclear TO WHOM he appeared nor clear WHERE. The Narrative does say that “initially they did not recognize him” but does not say why. So were I to cross-examine such an alleged witness, who could not tell me WHO saw him, WHERE they saw him, or WHOM they saw, I would move that the court simply strike the totally not-believable testimony from the record altogether, and the jury would rightly be instructed to disregard it.
Then the narrative “changes its mind” and says that some DID recognize him, although they initially had not. And later, among the apostles, this “person” apparently had physical wounds, related to being nailed to the cross at golgotha. Never mind that the apostle (doubting Thomas in this case) “stuck his fingers into the wounds” which supposedly established the fact of yeshua having survived death, although nowhere is Thomas claimed to have been present when yeshua was executed. So how would Thomas have considered the “wounds” to be indelible proof of anything?
The story is FURTHER PROBLEMATIC since there are also claims that (as was apparently the standard practice) that all three of the crucified victims, also had their legs broken. So how is it that the “wounds” were still there, yet yeshua WALKED with two broken legs?

if I told you that I was “the way” without a context, what does that phrase in english MEAN?

The idea, with COMPETENT translation is that the original Sense of the phrase, is preserved. obviously that was not the case with the “john” verse. We do not know what “John” meant, nor do we even know who John was. So we cannot apply an idiomatic phrase to “his culture” if we do not know what it was, nor to his “experiences” since we do not know what THOSE WERE either.

Again, how do you know that this is not a correct translation of the verse? We do have 23,000+ copies of the Gospel of John, including the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, which can be dated from around 140. You put a lot of doubt where in reality there is very little. We know what Jesus meant by the phrase itself, the context of chapter 14, the context of the Gospel and the context of the Bible as a whole. Besides, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) has never been a verse that confuses people or is hard to understand. Unless, of course, people simply don’t want to believe it is true for personal reasons.

The context of the Gospel and the New Testament make that obvious. Besides, you only quoted one part of the verse. The problem is not in understanding what Jesus meant. It’s in deciding to believe in Him or reject Him.

If it were “obvious” I would not have any issues with it. Instead, I have a lot.

The reason I maintain that it is a bad translation, is deceptively simple: the phrase, as popularly quoted in english, makes no sense at all:

I am the way
a human cannot be “the way” to anything. Humans TAKE “ways” to get to destinations, but are not themselves “the way”.

…the truth…
humans might SEEK ‘the truth’ but they cannot BE the truth.

…the life…
humans might LIVE but are not “life” or “the life” (the latter phrase means NOTHING in english)

and the line does not make any MORE sense, when all three phrases are stuck together as a single sentence. Remember neither Koine greek nor street latin, include punctuation. those were added MUCH LATER and imply context that is totally arbitrary.

So we really have to consider each phrase SEPARATELY as well as “in a unified thought” but there is no particular reason to terminate that “thought” with just the part that is popularly quoted.

So not only do I regard this verse as a BAD TRANSLATION (since the sense of it, appears to have been lost), it is a worse example of artificial punctuation, and of fully questionable editing and compilation as well, since an EXPLANATION of what it means, is totally missing from the text.

Yes, Jesus saying what He did doesn’t make any sense if He is only a human being. But since He was fully human and fully God, it all makes sense.

Jesus is the way- the only way by which people can know God.
Jesus is the truth- All that Jesus did and said is true. All truth comes ultimately from God.
Jesus is the life- Only through faith in God can we have real life.

As Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

Through faith in Jesus- His death on the cross and bodily resurrection from the dead as full payment for all our sins- anyone can come to the Father. That is, enter into a personal relationship with God.